First off let me say DO NOT STOP STEEMING. I believe 100% that Steem will keep growing. They are currently working on a lot of the problems and coming out with smart media tokens (SMT’s) that will cause Steem to skyrocket this year. People getting huge upvote for content with no value usually upvote the,selves and yes you are right, their whale friends that upvote also, but you can’t blame friends for helping friends. All you can do is grow your account. Reason you may not being getting paid a substantial amount is because of the way you market your account. You have to have eye catching titles and a loud picture to pull the readers in, once they click on your post you should have valuable content and they will respond to it in positive ways. Trust me. You have to make sure you’re posting one solid blog a day and that your tags are popular tags that are trending on steemit. Lastly you have to market your account, make a YouTube, Dtube, Dmania and connect all your accounts to pull in more followers. You can even make a website like I did on WordPress and hook it up to your account. Mines brandonscalera.com and all it does is bring people to steemit. Spending a couple dollars on advertising your post with SBD also and just keep pushing. Once you get close to 1000k followers your account starts to take off.

Post once per day good content.
Follow others.
Upvote, resteem amd comment others posts.
Write with passion, find your niche.