As a minnow in the current system, even if you make great content that does generate a lot of natural upvotes once it gets noticed, you will very frequently find your posts getting little to no traction if you don't buy an early upvote. The ability to buy upvotes actually transfers power from whales to minnows, without it, whales have 100% complete control over what content gets seen.

I wanted to test steem out from a minnow perspective so I made a new account and slowly have built up a reasonable amount of follows / steemit (still small bet steady progress) and I literally was getting nowhere until I started reinvesting my post rewards into early vote buys to get my posts noticed. Often after that initial investment they would go on to make $20+ but without the initial bump the exact same content would make 2 or 3 cents.

I don't think its a bad thing to give people who are confident that their content is good a way to pay for it to get noticed and the ability to reap the rewards if there investment in an early upvote does in fact pay off. This is actually a very simple and effective method of early curation that removes power from the whales. Without randowhale/booster/steemlike/etc my guess is I would have gotten nowhere.

Early on, I thought that vote buying was a huge problem with steemit, but I've come to believe that in reality, without it, a small number of whales would dominate the front page even more than they already do and keep most or all of the platform rewards for themselves.