I'll talk about the steemit platform. From the way it's looking now, if you didn't join steemit in 2016 or early 2017, your chances of becoming a whale is very slim.
Getting upvotes is now a thing of "man know man" . You'll have to know someone with good sp before you can get frequent upvotes.
Creating quality contents is no longer the dogma of this platform. For the average steemian, getting upvotes is a game of chance hence discouraging people from taking their time to create good contents.
This problem is mainly because whales don't really care about curating good contents. They rather just use their steempower to make profit.
Let me stop here for now
Yes this is very discouraging, but believe me there are still people on this platform who will upvote you. You will just have to find them and bring them value