Part of this is due to many having their votes set to do so using a bot. I wonder at times how much content is actually read that has votes.

Thanks for the reply! You're right on both points, especially the one excerpted. Much of my own voting power runs on autopilot, too, so I have no grounds to complain. Although, I do try to keep an eye on my bot and have the rules up to date so that my votes are distributed to diverse authors and valuable topics.

My point in posting isn't to gripe about the rewards, though. That's just how the game works here. In this post, I just wanted to do some extra post and idea promotion. I've never really been much of a marketing person, but for Steem to grow out of the doldrums, I think we all need to pick up a little bit of that skill. It doesn't do much good for anyone if I put a bunch of thought into the design of these posts and then keep it all to myself.