Well, to be fair - who really cares about commercial use pictures of coffee or even posts about non-existent "whale wars?"
The answer is: the people voting for them.
If you want quality content, you need quality voters. As it stands, many posters and voters are just playing the "trending topic" game. Tons of quality content is being ignored or completely drowned out and I don't really see a lot of whales helping to curate such content. At some point the game is going to have to change or lots of the quality writers will simply bail.
I would love to be able to get recognition for my posts, but instead, I just keep seeing whales and other influential voters complaining about trending content - when they are the ones who can actually correct it and start supporting those who are doing everything they can to get their quality posts in front of more eyes and be rewarded for their talents and efforts.
If whales want quality, it's in their power to find it and reward it. Isn't that the reason for being a whale? To ensure long-term viability of the platform by retaining those who can produce quality over quantity? Or is that not the case?
I've seen whales that are actively distributing and seeking unseen content. The problem is our community is growing (doubling within a few weeks) and there are limited whales so they're having a hard time keeping up.
I'm sensing a sense of entitlement unfortunately from a lot of people who feel unnoticed. Personally I'm not looking for whales or dolphins. By being consistent in my posts I'm seeing a very gradual increase in my list of followers. It's not the lotto that motivates me it's the future!
I was referring more to the ones who are upvoting the trendy content for the sake of making money on it. The fact of the matter is, if they want a change in voting and actually want the quality content, then the whales are the ones who are going to have to take the lead on it. They have the ability to greatly impact the voting habits on the platform. That's why they're whales in the first place. They're supposed to curate the quality content, not simply find the easiest posts on which to make money.
I'm not accusing anyone in particular and I'm not saying that it's all of the whales. But whatever the case may be, they have the power to change it.
@beanz
Not the trending content, but the trendy content. Like the steemit tags and the celebrity posters and whatnot. When the crowd knows what the trendy topics are, they're going to go vote them, even preemptively in the hopes that they'll be rewarded. The whales can change what is trending and what tends to be trendy by bucking it and finding quality.
Like I said - the very purpose of the whales is to curate quality; to reward those who deliver on quality content to make the platform more viable for the long-term. I'm not really seeing much of that. If there aren't enough whales to do that, then that's also a problem. But the incentive for curating tends to be skewing the trends and even influencing whale votes while they're missing out on far too much other quality. Dolphins seem to be helping, but the same curating incentive appears to be creating similar trends.
I don't know what the solution is, but if the voting habits continue, the quality will suffer at the expense of the entire platform - which, in turn, doesn't exactly benefit the whales. So it's on them to figure out a way to resolve the issues.
Voting on content that's already trending doesn't give them higher rewards than finding unrecognised posts that are likely to do well. The trouble is not everybody understands that once a post has been whale bombed the curation reward for any after voters is not as high, instead they think they'll make money by voting for what's trending and because they think this it doesn't matter as much to the whales what they vote on because the minnows are following them regardless of the quality of the post they vote. At least that's what I'm seeing.
@atx-david
Your comment is illogical. Everyone can't be early to vote on that content. Someone has to vote for it once it is already (low) trending to send the reward into the thousands and beyond. The people doing that aren't doing it for the rewards.
What is a "quality post" except those posts people happen to like.
The issue is, at this point, Trending is what people see first, not their feed of people they have followed. So getting on the start page is going to be the goal, and how to make yourself viral.
People can and should pick their own start page. Set your browser bookmark to
https://steemit.com/@wizwom/feed