As a matter of fact, this happens on pretty much every social media platform. Celebrities get more and more attention and followers everyday. And basing popularity on number followers is just a marketing tactic by the creators to keep u on their platform, yearning for reconciliation, making u work more for it. How do u think Facebook is so popular?

This is one of the reasons why I quit social media. Oh, and one more thing...

If u wish to find quality content, the average person would obviously turn to the person with the highest reputation score cause he/she would've made some quality content to reach that level. That person wouldn't want to rummage around the vast majority of the low reputation score users...

But I do agree on the fact that people shouldn't completely disregard them. People of all reputation scores should view and upvote quality content by newbies once in a while. Steemit has a bunch of curators like @good-karma who upvote quality posts and comments by newbies.

But other than this, I don't know what other solution is possible.