When I first came to Steemit about 4 months ago, I was kind of naive. I thought Steemit to be a place where people with quality content got rewarded in a kind of social and democratic way of means. Quickly came I to realize this was far from how it actually worked...
Steemit
First and foremost, Steemit is a business model. And those who invest, play smart or make the right friends, will be the beneficiaries. This doesn't mean that when one is making good quality content, will not be able to make a nice buck for its efforts. It all depends whether someone else is willing to reward the person for its work, and how much he cares about its own gain.
Within a month or so of being here I noticed all the auto-voting. People circle jerking one another for the best curation rewards. The trending pages being filled with the same persons over and over. An echo chamber of sorts of speak. Now I am not saying that everyone on here is greedy and selfish douchebag. But fair is fair, we're all here to make some money. And when you can make two to three times as much by "exploiting", or rather by playing your cards in a certain way... the choice is usually easily made.
Who's to blame?
It's to question whether the community or the system at hand is the core of the problem. It probably is a bit of both. Personally I believe the way curation works needs to be totally revamped. People should be enticed to look for newly created quality posts, and being rewarded for doing so. Sadly, currently this ain't the case. The efforts vs. the rewards gained, are often not worth it...
A rise in voting bots, where one can pay to get votes, has now become an alternative to boost one's visibility, and potentially make some extra (quick) money. Again this is my personal believe, but I find it to be a symptom of the once again bigger problem, namely, the curation reward system.
Posting vs. Engagement
Another great issue we're dealing with, is the fact that we have too many contributors. People are more motivated to create their own posts rather than to curate or engage. Doubling the gain of curation rewards might already help a great deal for this matter, although obviously it won't fix things. Something I've been thinking about as well, is that it might be a nice idea to increase the reward gains from the comment pool slightly compared to that of the posts. Making people more motivated to upvote comments, benefiting both the upvoter (curator) and commentator, in turn creating more engagement.
For those that want to know more
A great article by 
https://steemit.com/curation/@thecryptofiend/the-curation-conundrum