Holy shit dude..beautifully written lol. I'm relatively new to steemit but quickly realized exactly what you've just nailed..ya gotta spend money to make money on here. Nothing I write about is interesting enough for me to expect to actually earn anything worth mention from it, but people generally don't even seem to look if they don't already know who you are.

I see some posts on here earning hundreds of dollars, only to look further and see that 70% of the reward is coming from the authors own upvote, and an array of bots that he paid to upvote him.

All fake indeed, kind of a flaw in the platform if you ask me. To boot, steemit is a serious melting pot, in an unorganized way compared to sites like facebook. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it kind of sucks when half of the people that may view your article or short won't understand half of it outside of basic english. Then they go one further and leave you a comment kind of like this:

"Sir u are doing very well here sir i upvote and follow u please do the same thank you sir"

I'm not knocking anyone here, i love anyone that takes the time to read my garbage, but do they really read it? Doubtful.

They never do upvote or follow either, bastards.