Wow, this post answers a lot of questions I had.

When I started using my Steemit account after a few months absence I saw some posts talking about the downvoting of @michelle.gent's posts and I wondered what was going on.
She said that her many fans had followed her over to Steemit and were spending their own money on Steem and claimed that this was how she got the upvotes and that the downvotes were vicious and unfair. Nowhere was it mentioned that self voting from a whale account was being used to ensure a hefty portion of the reward pool and to give an unfair advantage in relation to writers who aren't sexually involved with whale accounts.

Having been on Steemit for longer than five minutes now and having read the other side of the argument in this post, I'm a bit annoyed.

I personally put hours into writing and drawing original content exclusive to Steemit and I don't even get so much as a "Good post" comment, so I don't know if people have read my posts and liked them, or what they think. I do consider it a bit of a p*sstake to read that someone was cutting and pasting their previously published book to this site getting her husband to upvote it, whinging in numerous posts when it gets downvoted and also lying through omission and claiming that her fans, from when it was previously published as an ebook are the ones upvoting it.
Now thinking of this objectively, I know that the claims of votes by previous fans is a lie because:
1)If you self publish a book on Amazon for example, you agree to make them aware if it is available elsewhere, so you can't really make it available on Steemit and sell it on Amazon. Why would someone who was successfully making an income on Amazon enough to have fans who would sign up and pay for Steemit basically make their books available for a set of one off payments and then free for the rest of eternity, because the content can't be deleted?

2)When a book is published on Amazon the writer gets paid not only for actual sales but also for pageviews on Kindle Unlimited via a monthly community pool, so again if the fans were there why would you need or want to receive a very limited reward from Steemit for previously published works? You wouldn't.

Actually I think that a lot of creators leave Steemit because of this undeserved domination of the certain tags and other manipulation of the platform, because a lot of people come here thinking that this site will be different to the crap seen on other sites and then it turns out to be just the same.