"UGH I HATE THOSE WHALES!!!"
How many times have you found yourself saying that? How many times have you poured your heart and soul into a post, after countless hours of research and styling and uploading images, to get 20 or 30 votes, and only make $.30?
Well, the Whales hold a majority share of the voting power, around 85%, and for the most part, they use bots. So it's only natural that those bots will vote for another Whale's post. In order for your post to go viral, you have to get lucky. If a Whale, (or a couple Dolphins) happens to be online and vote on your post, other Whales will follow.
"BUT IT'S NOT FAIR FOR SO FEW TO HOLD SO MUCH POWER"
Sure it is. There's no such thing as "Old Money" in Steem, none of these Whales is some fat cat living off of the Steem handed down since his family opened the first Steem mine in the late 1500's. Cryptocurrency is a bit like the lottery. Investing time and money in a new crypto is a risk. Every startup makes promises about their new and unique idea. Most either never take off, or are pump and dump schemes that end up being practically worthless. The first people to take a chance on the Steemit platform took a chance on an idea that they liked, and they won the lottery. The same lottery that Minnows continue to play every day in hopes of "striking it rich".
NOW THAT STEEMIT HAS GOTTEN SO BIG, THEY NEED TO RESTRUCTURE THE PAYMENT SYSTEM
A vast number of improvements has been made to the curation and author rewards. However, a balance needs to be maintained. In a true free market you need to have "corporate fat cats', middle managers and working class citizens. For every Minnow that makes $2,500 on that perfect post, there are 1000 Minnow posts that go unnoticed. If you were the Minnow that made that perfect post, you now have quite a bit of Steem Power. You are entering the Dolphin stage. Would you want to lose your power over some perceived sense of unfairness?
Steemit is a an experiment, both in social networking an Blockchain technology. Even at this stage you are an early adopter of what may one day represent the new standard in social networking. If Steemit ends up with 100 million users, everyone that is involved at this stage will be a Whale by contrast. It's a matter of levels, and all great ideas had to start on level one. Rejoice in being a part of it.