Now it has changed. Not drastically, but slowly and surely. The posts getting the most rewards are those which voters simply vote on because they'll get nice curation rewards. Most voters don't care about quality anymore. Most post writers also don't. It's all about the money.
Sure, there are a few good people out there who do make a lot of money on SteemIt while trying their best to make quality posts, but these are in the minority and even if they stopped caring about quality they'd still make a lot of money.
What does this mean for new up and coming writers? People keep saying "interact with your community", but what community is there if no one pays attention to your posts? It is impossible for new members to get anywhere just by writing quality posts.
How can we fix this? To be honest, there's no fix-it-all plan for this. It's in the human nature to be greedy and want money. What we can do is raise awareness of this and convince people to look at the new posts and actually take the time to pick out one which has nearly no votes after a few minutes and read it. If they can see that the post is quality stuff, upvote it. Of course, it'll be hard to convince most people to let go of their easy money-making ways and actually care about other people. But that's what I hope we can do, at least to some people...
