I don't think it's necessarily that if you're new or not well-known nobody cares about your content and only care about the whales/early adopters. I think it's more about exposure and when you post, with a little luck thrown in.
Just like Reddit and Tumblr and most social media sites, you could post something entirely thoughtful and worth many people's time to read, but it could just simply get buried in the sheer quantity of posts and go unnoticed.
For example, I'm new here, wrote a post about Bitcoin gambling, and it took me ~45 mins to write it, and it was buried in less than 30 minutes. Now most people will probably never see it unless they directly visit my profile. The same goes for anyone else.
On the other hand, if you get lucky and a whole truckload of people see your post as soon as it's up, and up-vote it, you're more likely to have a popularity snowball effect.
That's just my opinion, take it as you will. :)
I agree. I've been on Steemit for a while (my first post was 2 months ago, before the first payout). I haven't really made many posts so haven't built much of a reputation or become very well known to the others who were here early on (including the whales). As such, most of my posts have received very few upvotes and rewards.
The massive increase in content over the past few weeks has really impacted on the visibility of posts. People that have been here a while are still only human. They can only read and vote on so many posts each day. I expect it's true that they check out content from contributors they have read before and liked just like you might be more inclined to read a book from an author you've enjoyed reading before. I don't see it as not being part of a 'Club' of early adopters. I think it's more that it's hard to get noticed. I kind of think about Steemit as a lottery - your post is your ticket, the odds of winning are low, but you have to be in it to win it!
BTW @voltarius - read your gambling post, gave you an upvote.
Thanks for the feedback on my post and the upvote man! :)