@gonzo, that is an extremely broad brush you are painting with, you have no idea what many of the whales and dolphins you lump into one general category are doing to grow this platform and everybody's investment.
True there are abuses but rather not generalize.
If "milking it" was my strategy why have I, out of my own, cut down to posting a maximum of 3 times in a week? ...specifically to leave plenty of voting power for others.
That means of a potential 77, 100% votes per week I use a whopping 3, let me repeat that THREE on my own content. That's perhaps 5% of my voting power per week... the rest is spread around on all kinds of projects and growth areas.
If you are looking for abuse, look elsewhere please, and don't generalize. There are many others getting a far greater and more selfish return on their investment ether directly or indirectly from the reward pool.
And incidentally, it is their investment in SP and the rules allow them to use it as they wish.
Is it the best for the platform if they use it selfishly?
I'm not in a position to judge since this ecosystem and user-base is too complex for anybody to claim they have all the data.
Anybody who doesn't like the way things are is welcome to get SP and do things differently.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"
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@gavvet
I don't want you to feel like this is an attack and I have no interest in looking into your account for other abuses like you suggested.
My only concern is about the voting-ring that is claiming the majority of the rewards pools and the trending page for themselves, which should be your main concern too.
You're right, I did notice how, all at once, most of the voting-ring began limiting their weekly posts, but I think it just isn't enough to stop the exodus.
Why don't we try an experiment where the voting-ring limits their payouts by 50% and use the other 50% to curate quality posts to see if we can keep more people on Steemit and to see if this will increase the value of our holdings?