If you're new, just pretend none of this ever happened :) Enjoy posting and curation from June 20th.

As for how to become a whale - pretty much buy up a million dollars worth of Steem and power up. You could also attempt to make enough post and curation rewards, but at this point with growing blogging competition, it could take years of not decades going that route. Good news is even if you're a minnow, your account could be worth thousands of dollars and that's infinitely more than Facebook or Reddit would pay you.