Well, dude. It's not really about the content. Maybe at the very beginning of this thing, the content mattered some, but now in 2018, what is posted is absolutely meaningless. It's about who posts it. This thing runs on relationships.

I'm not even saying that it's somehow wrong, or anything. It's just an observation of a fact. And to be fair, the real world isn't any different. I've gotten promotions and whatnot just based on the fact that the people above me liked me as a person. Sure, I worked hard, but Id'd say joking around with the right people and giving them a positive impression of me helped a lot more.

Post if you like posting. If you're here to make money, I'd say it's pretty pointless to be here. You can try to network, get delegation, suck up to the right people, etc. to get the bigger votes, but any attempt to "improve your content" in hopes of the big upvotes is a wasted effort.

You're not in the club, which means that the large stakeolders will never click on your posts, let alone read them, let alone upvote them. Upvotes are either bought, or they're given out in a vote for vote fashion. If you don't have the sufficient SP to give out big votes to those giving out big votes, they won't benefit from you, and you'll get skipped.

That's not even taking into account the fact that you post controversial stuff about politics, and that sort of stuff is frowned upon here, as well. It's a political game. No one wants to touch risque material like immigration, racism, etc. because that may place them in a negative light, and it might cost them their own whale support. It's better, then, to just stay away from that.

Like I said, post if you enjoy posting, but adjust your expectations. It's stake based voting platform, and there was never another way for things to turn out; Steemit is not about the content, it's about people printing themselves free money.

And again, I'm not even saying that it's a "bad thing", per se, it's just a free market, and they always work on nepotism. It's natural and it is what it is.

It's pointless to look at someone's TA or meme shitposts and think: "Oh, I should just do that" because the posts are just a smokescreen. The people "on top" could be posting blank posts with nothing in them and make the exact same amount of money.

People don't upvote posts, they upvote users.