Thinking like a whale
Steemit is a harsh world indeed, your there wondering why haven't I made it just once to the front page despite the original content I keep posting. I was asking my self the same question while making very small rewards and then all of a sudden one of my post went viral.
Put yourself in their shoes for two second
You need to put yourself in their shoes and try to think about all the factors that come trough their mind when it comes to upvoting certain content. I will not deny, there is some confusing upvoting made by whales at times but hey! they invested their own money early on and believed in this project while we were still hesitant, we cannot claim this is an injustice since I am pretty sure most of us heard about steemit before it even become that big but never really decided to pay real attention to it.
What I mean by thinking like a whale is to look at the whole steemit development so far from a whale perspective and ask yourself what have we done so far that made us lean toward such a fast userbase growth. The answer is , giving attention to guenine and real people sharing their stories because these people are going to be the core community of this platform.
Can you imagine if whales were really going all out upvoting quality content that they didn't even like just to promote content? This would equal making a website building up it's content and sharing it on social networks to show the world hey! look at my website I write content come and like it. And that would be it, nothing to attract a real community just some good reasons to attract more writers which are going to lack readers obviously.
See the bigger picture from a whale perspective
Once again let's stick to what whales have been actually thinking all this time. By encouraging newcomers sharing their experience, people opening themselves to the community, people who are indeed trying to change their life for the better. This is how in my own "whale" perspective I would be thinking is the best option in order to create a legit community which will grow with the right mindset from the very start.
Can you imagine if steemit was only about quality stories/ professional writers, news reporters ect.. being upvoted by the thousands since the very start? All we would have is literally a platform where writers are kings indeed! But I think it would turn into a content war and they would end up fighting each other over the few upvotes remaining in the community. Because let's be honest if steemit was only about professionals writers, there would be no crowd to upvote them and to promote the platform like we have it right now! I hope you see what I mean and I am sorry If I am not making it easy for you to understand.
How will we (smaller fish) benefits from this in the long term?
We will benefit from this by being able to early on build up our steem power and get known by some members of the community. We have the advantage right now to (for some of us) have followers and we are right now building up relations that will benefits us in the long term. your steem power right now might be pretty low just like mine but! the value is residing in growing the platform which will make our steempower a lot more significant knowing how a bigger platform will generate a higher demand pushing the steems prices and valuing our steempower at a much greater influence then it is right now.
My conclusion
Like I said, It is not easy to make BIG money with steemit, but the way I see it everyone is at least able to make a couple of $ out of their interaction within the community. Steemit is a very young community which is clearly aiming to establish it self in a very competitive environment. The big advantage we have with steemit is that the whole community is looking forward to grow the platform by their numerous actions from creating apps to advertise on websites (some of them with their own earned money). I can only see steemit get better from what we have right now, it is a big game of patience. If you are not making money, just act as if this was your regular social network platform where you've always expressed yourself not thinking about making money, you will end up making some aniway!