If there's something cruel about nature, it'd be the -always- naturally occuring Zipf's law distribution, which has something to do with limited cognition and flood of entities to give attention to (like there's a million English words, but we really only use 100 of them 90% of the time).

I can't speak for other curation guilds, but I can speak for Curie in this instance. There's absolutely no gaming whatsoever, and the only goal is to have a fatter tail for the inevitable Zipf distribution for social network accounts, all by going through the many posts out there. If there's someone close to me submitting posts for Curie's consideration, I will be the first to give others notice and not vote on it personally - and there's no such thing as self-voting on self-submitted posts anyway.

Not sure how else to help, if helping itself is not good enough for anyone's standards. Anyway, I have a post with close to 1400 views, and nowhere near the highest paid post ever. It's not a good correlation. I remember an NSFW post by alexanova getting way more views than votes. In the end it's just who decides to vote.

Time is limited, and networks of trust is also limited (like how we can really only have about 100 friends) - which is why early adopters tend to be voted more by whales, and have been progressively let out of that voting habit. In a way it's a delegation of influence. You may also check out @liberosist's recent post about the wealth distribution that has happened.

My Steemit posts are actually an improved reflection of 10 years of free contents that I've been producing on Facebook for almost no readers since 2007. I know it may not come off right, being a fairly well-supported author here, but whatever that I've been doing is just contributing all that I really want to put out for others without thinking about the money. But there's no denying the payouts have helped me in a variety of ways.

You may follow my advice, or there's just another way to do it - study the whales and see what they like, then serve it to them. What remains is that all actions are voluntary, and there are no guarantees.. even Curie couldn't help out all new accounts out there.