I#m fortunate to have a job that cover the bills, so Steem can be a hobby for me. It has great potential for creative people to earn from their work. It really needs a bigger audience to make that viable, but a few people do well already.

I'm not sure what you mean about filtering. Self-voting is only really worth while if you have a lot of SP. For now some people can get a good return on buying votes unless we take action. A couple of dollars profit per day may be worth it to some.

Some people do thorough investigations that uncover voting circles and sock puppet accounts. If these are exposed then the bigger accounts could cancel out their rewards. I would hope that more users would lead to a better reward spread, but if we attract lots of scammers then it could get worse.

We shall see.