The funny thing is, when my posts were getting reasonable payouts from the whales, a few minnows complained about it. They said it wasn't fair, so the whales who were using bots to upvote my posts stopped doing that.
At the same time, if they do not do that then some of my readers might think it's not fair that some of my better posts receive such small payouts.
Honestly there is no making everybody happy. I post and I get the payout I get. I never complain about how small or how large the payout is. I don't concern myself with the payouts others get. Maybe they are better at it than I am and nothing is wrong with that.
yeah, it's maybe the best position that can be: just don't worry about payouts. I try to follow this rule as well, and just write something what I'm personally interested in. Earlier I tried to follow main trends and chose topics that I supposed would be paid but I never had the right variant - payouts didn't come, or come for the posts I didn't even expect to be paid at all.