I hope it can succeed in some form. Posts like this give me hope. There is a core community who care about the platform. The greedy ones with the highly rewarded posts may not make as much as you think when they have paid for the votes and that may be less viable after HF21. That may free up more rewards for people like you. I will keep pushing for good content to be rewarded even if it means I make less. Standing up to one bully today got me a flood of flags, but a good person cancelled those out.
Thanks for the comment! I wasn't sure anybody would open the ball :)
Maybe I am too negative, but I still think I get some important point that often get overlooked in the dominating economical and technical understanding of what is going on. To be fair it is not only Steemit that has a hard time including the softpower of culture, communication and cake.
I am not concerned about the posters in trending. They have to constantly power down to pay for the upvotes. The real problem is that Smartsteem and the rest is sitting on the system as giant parias that makes the percentage banks and paypal and all the likes charge seem small and feeble. To me that is corruption and I have a hard time supporting corruption (bet hey, I am not a libertarian :) I read the post you linked to, and it might be a good thing if these large profiles and their business destroyed each other. But vote buying is devastating for the platform no matter how legit they think the concept is.
I will stay here mainly because of people like you - the community in other words. There really are so many interesting people here, I will also still be voting for quality and for good comments of course. But I have become weary of Steemit as an institution if not the wonderful community. And it has nothing to do with how much I earn - it is exactly what I tried to express in the post ethical, democratic and egalitarian reasons.
For some people it is just a business and they will make money any way they can. We care more about the community and rewarding worthy content. Even if you just vote now you will earn well, but I hope you continue to post too.
I would like to try and build up some sort of campaign to vote up quality content to get it seen more. I am not sure we can compete with vote sellers, but it is worth trying. Not sure how it can work yet.
I will keep posting, and if you find a way we can promote good content you can count on me putting both some time and Steem into it.