I wasn't meaning to invalidate your experience. I know that a lot of whales haven't invested a dime into the platform and got to this point through sheer perseverance and hard work.
I feel that the difficulties for today's minnows are much more significant than those experienced by users a year ago. The bandwidth issues are extreme (sometimes I have 40kb to work with) and sometimes you'll earn a single penny on content that took two hours to write.
In no way do i blame the whales/dolphins for these issues. I've seen a lot of community support from large and small users alike. But the platform has some serious usability issues that need to be addressed if it's going to see growth as a mainstream social media platform.
I appreciate your detailled reply and of course the upvote.
Read this 8 month old post that a lot of people find helpful and still find it with google searches to this day:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@intelliguy/if-you-re-new-to-steem-or-steemit-and-you-aren-t-making-hundreds-of-dollars-yet-let-me-explain-why
..and enjoy the great comments on it.
I'm so disappointed that it didn't ironically make 11 cents and get three views! :P
All valid points. I've made a few hundred dollars and 75 followers over three three weeks so I'm really not struggling all that badly. Sometimes it's just discouraging to see a two day old spam bot outpacing my account, or a cat meme raking in profits while my content goes unseen. I can be a bit of a pessimist at times. Sometimes that energy gets turned into complaining for no good reason, and other times it magically converts into real action and attempts to improve.
Thanks for the realistic perspective.