Thank you very much for your comment, I'll try to give you an answer you'll be satisfied with.

I know that certain things might look awful and I won't try to defend certain peoples actions. However, heavily invested people used to manually vote and support Steemians. A single vote from a whale could easily be enough motivation for Steemians from all over the world to stick around and put in tons of effort.

That was obviously cool to witness, and I've been lucky enough to receive some of these votes myself too. Even though I truly loved how the manual curation worked, as it brought tons of motivation to the platform, it was also a "flawed" approach at the same time.

• And why?

Well, the "inner circle" for instance. A small group of people who voted on each others content, without even reading it. Low quality or high quality. It didn't matter. They got votes from the same group of people day in and day out... Which obviously made them rich and wealthy in a blink of an eye.

Steemit have never been fair in my opinion. I wouldn't call it a "lottery" which I've heard many times before. Sure, it might have looked like a lottery for some people, as it was almost impossible to get whale votes back in the day... But, it was never a lottery. It was and still is about who you know.

If you have heavily invested friends on Steemit, you'll have an easy path ahead of you. The road towards success and tons of Steem Power will be extremely easy as you'll get support from your friends at all times.

This is understandable, but far from a perfect system, as the low quality content will be rewarded automatically. Steemit was always about high quality, but with "inner circles" and nowadays bid-bots and vote-sellers, it is about content. Not low quality, not high quality... Just content.

This brings us to an entire new level.

You need content to make money. You publish whatever you want, you either buy votes or have your investor-friends upvote it... or both. - Steemit have become something similar to a personal cash-cow.

In need of cash? - Just publish some garbage on Steemit and rake in thousands of dollars per month. That's basically how things are today, even though we have different projects and several people trying to fight the rewardpoolrape with flags and all.. It just won't help to solve everything.

We need a new HardFork to solve certain things, but I doubt we'll see a new HF with solutions to these problems. I guess we'll see some changes, but I doubt we'll see changes that will truly change how the entire system works today.