i do think that vote selling performs a purpose as well. Currently - pretty much the only way to climb the ranks so to speak is to either use vote bots, or have some whales that vote generously. There is too much of a gapbetween the votes of a minnow and the votes of a whale.

I had a post the other day that had something like 65 votes. They were all minnows, so it yielded me around 0.20 in rewards. for something that has that much interest I would expect it to be much higher. If i had just 1 whale it could have been in the hundreds.