STEEMIT became a centralized cesspool of whales upvoting other whales. I hope to see a change from that here on Hive.

Better content discovery is the most immediate solution to this. I know I was voting more or less the same people over and over on Steem for years mostly due to the feed being the only place I would look for new content daily. Without good ways to find new content from new users without spending a lot of time, it becomes natural to only curate those you already know. Then the same people end up on Trending -> becomes the only creators that new people see and thus follow -> reinforces the old voting pattern.

The best place for you to start here is certainly to pick a few communities that are curated well (perhaps OCD and crypt0) and then share your posts there