Well said, I have been in a battle with these whales.
The only way you have freedom of speech and will make money on th block chain is to ban together with alot of similarly minded individuals.
In fact with what happaned with the hf21 changes to curation and author payouts, any post with roughly less than 20 steem in it's reward pool is earning significantly less then by (40%) on rewards for a vote.
I have a group called the steeminati (there are 40 members n it). We have together over 250,000 sp worth of upvotes we use on our members.
This means our reward pool on our posts are around 20 steem.
If you vote for any our posts you will be earning more for curation then if you voted (like this one) which is less than 3 steem.
These are the members, I suggest you join in with curation upvotes, and participate in the contests we enter!
You will at least get curation rewards at a fair rate...
Plus we post funny stuff that will make you smile...