wow no kidding, thanks for saying like it is... first off thank you for posting this, I have max upvoted it and resteemed and now following you. Here is my experience so far. I transferred about a grand $1000 over here 3-4 months ago and have spent considerable time creating posts of relatively somewhat valuable content, and tried to get discussions going but overall to no avail. If it wasn't for a few generous whales taking pity on a few of my postings they all would have flopped completely. My account is now worth about $800. That may be partially due to the drop in the price of Steem on the marketplace, so if it had stayed where it was I would probably be around breaking even at this point. What I am seeing is a platform where 3% of Steemit members are raking in 97% of the Steem. So instead of networking and trying to help new users I am desperately trying to not lose more account value. I wait for my favorite whales to post and max upvote as early as I can to try and generate "vests" or curation awards? I don't know exactly it is confusing - but I have stopped posting because it is frustrating to be ignored, especially when just attempting to get a discussion going about a coin or the overall crypto space or whatever - people are ignoring me because I am not a whale, and they also are trying to not lose account value, so to upvote my content would be a waste of money. On one of my posts regarding my children raising money for a kids with cancer, I received 100 upvotes and it sat at $5 for about a week, then I guess a few whales saw it, and the upvotes went from 100 to 103, and the post jumped to $23. I don't know, I have not given up entirely but I am powering down because after watching this thing and attempting to participate for 4 months, I am definitely seeing a Social Media platform that imo is not sustainable. When Jerry Banfield can do a post of how be brushes his teeth, and get $400, I call bullshit. And no disrespect to Jerry, his content is AMAZING but is it worth 20-30 thousand a month? When he is also raking it in on YouTube for the same posts, I mean, c'mon. Anyway I do hope Steem succeeds, it is quite addictive, but if I am experiencing frustration and feeling ignored, how can I expect my 800+ Facebook friends to transition over? No way. I don't see that happening. There need to be some fundamental changes to how value is distributed and some caps put on the amount whales can earn here. I mean nobody should be able to make more than $20 grand a month here, or be able to upvote their own posts up $300 bucks or whatever. Obviously I am foggy on the details of how the payouts are structured, but I know something needs to change or this house of cards will fall in on itself, so that is just my 2 cents worth, a random view from a new user. I am remaining active on Steemit but powering down my account to get what I can back out in case it does implode due to inequalities. But much luck to everyone here, I mean no disrespect to anyone, I have learned a great deal, and will stay here -a bit more of a passive user, as with 4 kids and a full time job I don't have the time required to create valuable content and fight through the long process of being basically ignored for the most part. So good night my Steemit friends and always remember this message from your friend Hive account@cryptoted