The goal of Steem is to reward users proportional to the value they bring

Absolutely agree that this is the goal of steemit and we as the userbase can choose to treat steemit as a secondary posting place for pictures, a way to find new content, or a serious job where we pour our heart into comments and blog posts.

I also had a question about the impact that would be had if the following were to happen:

One person becomes largely successful on steemit. They then say to their facebook friends hey make a profile on steemit and do nothing but upvote my content. If someone has 1 million facebook followers, even though there is only a small amount in each persons wallet that votes, couldn't the original poster wait until the other users made enough money and power down all the accounts with the destination being the original poster (the other accounts would only vote together on this one persons blog posts).

Is there any way to prevent this from happening? Basically creating a whale by upvoting content that is not really worth the amount of value that user brings?

Value is subjective, but I worry that some people have short term gains in mind and couldn't care less about other uses or the future of steemit.

Where money goes, greed follows. That will always be true. I don't know if there is a way to keep many people from attempting to do this very thing.

I would like to write a post about what the duties of a fat minnow should be (my upvotes change a comment or post a penny so I am still a minnow, but not a new minnow). It will definitely touch on not always upvoting friends content. Sometime the best thing you can do is not upvote a friends blog post because you feel they didn't put complete effort into it. It happens with everyone. We can't always create the best articles and writers hit writers block too.

I believe the following is very true though and should be followed to a tee to make sure steemit survives.

"Content is King!" that has no relation to whether or not the poster is your friend or someone you disagree with. Good content making money can only benefit steemit.

I'll expound further on other things I feel those in between minnow and dolphin (cuttlefish?) should be responsible for, since we still have the time to do a lot more than many whales do and can curate and help in other ways.