>A. People shouldn't be allowed to Up-vote their own content, especially whales who can instantly push that content to the top of the /trending page in the category (tags) they posted it in.....AHEM! (Yes I am guilty of it myself so I am not a hypocrite)
How would you prevent shill voting?
>B. Any system where a post gets 100 up-votes and is still under $5 Payout is inherently flawed, IMHO. Just look at my Post History and you will understand why I say that. If there are that many people who like the content it should be paid a reasonable and fare rate. Which brings me to my next point.
How many of those votes are organic?
I think you believe you deserve a larger payout for 100 upvotes, while I think that most of those votes come from bots and that it works as intended (bots shouldn't be able to give you $ without reading your post.). I know it cause, my bot (this account) has upvoted a lot of your stuff. **This is more a critique of the system than it is of your content.** It sucks for you, cause it probably gives you a false impression of what you should be getting.
I agree that the system might be flawed, maybe not for the same reasons. Content that will make the front page is just too easy to predict. Here's my trending page, I haven't upvoted a single of these posts manually, they were all upvoted by my bot - without it reading a single word:
<center> http://i.imgur.com/OT1Wi6Y.png) </center>
Its at a point where voting for what I believe is good content is probably not as good as letting my bot upvote what it deems will become popular. I would perform worse than my bot if I read everything on the site.
*I'm aware that I'm part of the problem, but it goes to show that the incentives aren't aligned properly.*
>C. The current structure of Steemit and especially the Voting system means that no matter how good or desired your content is, if you do not get Whale votes you do not make jack diddly squat for your efforts. I have over 50 Blog Posts with less than a $5 payout, most of them with a metric butt ton of votes. This leads to the next comment...
I totally agree, but you made it to a lot of bots radars too, and probably get more visibility than most people.
> As more and more whales get fatter and richer the minnows that are here are going to continue to grow disheartened and eventually leave. Additionally, any new members that arrive, with the hopes of making money on steemit are going to rapidly realize they don't stand a chance and move on as well. Without a constant influx of new users who contribute (and get a fair reward) new content steemit will not survive and will ultimately go the way of Digg/Slashdot in a few short years....if not sooner!
Are you proposing anything to solve those issues? I'd personally love to see a mix of @arcurus's visibility improvements ([here](https://steemit.com/steemit/@arcurus/tagging-and-flagging-hidden-by-a-whale-how-to-evolve-further)) and an incentivized downvoting system ([shameless plug](https://steemit.com/steemit/@owdy/scalability-content-quality-and-centralization-an-open-discussion-on-an-incentivized-downvote-system#@owdy/re-owdy-re-arcurus-re-owdy-re-williambanks-re-owdy-scalability-content-quality-and-centralization-an-open-discussion-on-an-incentivized-downvote-system-20160813t131602273z)).