There are lots of things about Steemit that don't seen fair but there's not much we can do to change that. I was bored of having almost nothing to upvote with, so I bought some Steem and powered up. Most of the money came from another coin that did well for me. Now at least I can upvote others and my own posts and make a little bit of steem and steem dollars. Hopefully the price of Steem will keep going up and my upvote will increase in value. If you don't have any money to power up, try the steemit chat site, Discord and Telegram. I haven't done that much but there's people that are willing to help.