Thanks for this post, Matt.
Yesterday was my first day on Steemit too and I'm still trying to figure things out. I noticed that I was willing to upvote good content from newbies like me, but others were not and your post helped me understand a little bit more why that may be so. I think you're absolutely right, that junk posts, by nature of how steemit works, appear to be here to stay...but how will Steemit get those like me who are interested in actually blogging real content to stick around? I don't want to lose my momentum but it's hard to shake the idea that I'm at a disadvantage.