Hmmm, well, this makes me want to stop posting my short stories (which take many hours to draft, edit, polish, post and find appropriate pictures for) to SteemIt and go to a different platform. Yikes. My thought however, is that this shit is being pushed just for that reason....to get good quality content off of Steemit, to sabotage the system. Alright then, I'll stick around a while longer, hopefully the people with the most to lose here will work together on some good solutions. We'll see.
This shit can be totally discouraging and does not make Steemit look very good.
I can understand your frustration with putting a lot of energy into something for seemingly very little returns, but I hope it doesn't turn you off completely! It's an interesting ecosystem here, and strategies for success are constantly being refined.
Are you utilizing support like @minnowsupport and @curie?
Nah, I don't go away that easily ;) Mind you, I've only been here a couple/three weeks, however some of the crap going on here sort of pops out at you pretty quick. The post you've ripped is particularly scummy...pumped up by the pay bots, then reinforced by the Bitconnect scammers (trevonjb, craig-grant) who are chucking their toys out the pram cause other whales are silencing them here (so now I guess they want to burn the house down? I dunno).
Anyway, there are definitely some great resources here. Yep, I know about curie and have had a few stories upped by them. I've seen @minnowsupport around though I thought this was just a pay bot like all the others....guess I need to investigate it, thanks for the heads up :)