Yes, that's right.
- Whale - Means people who joined steemit when it began and has massive steem-power, steem-power will dictate how much your post is worth it.
This post might not even hit the 10 up-vote mark and is mainly because no whale will vote for it, you rather need to tell a story about your life introducing yourself properly or have tit's in a post with nice pictures of yourself or be quiet insane to gain some traction, even then you might not be so lucky due to the flood of new posts being entered into the system a whale might not see you, I've seen a lot of under-valued posts where the author has written an amazing post and got some up-votes but none from a whale, therefore making it's value very little to none.
Where is decentralisation in this? Only whales can make you trend, because they up-vote is worth a lot of money! new steemers will unlikely get noticed unless his/hers posts get voted-up by a whale.
These are simply true facts and by no mean's were written to damage the reputation or steemit's value, it is merely an observation.