Let's all be entirely honest here. Has any post so far on this platform deserved thousands of dollars because hundreds of people have voted for it? That's the real problem here. We're talking about relatively tiny numbers of people reading and "voting" on content.
There are about 60,000 users today - with quite a large chunk of these being inactive and bots. we've seen payouts on posts over $15,000 on many occasions. Does anyone else not find this absurd, especially considering what the content commonly is?
Someone introducing themselves with a personal bio?
Somebody saying something as pointless as "Wow! Steemit is cool! What do you guys think we can do with this platform?"
Another person giving some sort of tech update or suggestions for future SteemIt updates?
What real value is added by these posts? Are they really deserving of thousands of dollars per post? I understand that authors can bring value and can add valuable content, but posting about SteemIt on SteemIt to a small SteemIt audience who then votes based on rewards that they get from SteemIt seems to be something along the lines of jerking stuff in a circle, doesn't it?
I watched a post the other day that simply had some photos of coffee and listed different brewing methods. No real explanations or tips on the different types. Not much writing at all. They seemed to just be generic free-use photos. But, people like coffee, so upvoted it was. It ended up with somewhere around $2000, I believe. For unoriginal photos and unoriginal, uninformative content. What value does that bring to SteemIt? And guess who voted on that one, @berniesanders?
It's not that certain posts or authors are getting absurd payouts - it's that the payouts in general can be so absurdly high, especially with so few users on the platform and no way to control it, other than a whale flagging.
Whales have entirely too much power on both sides and you guys continually upvote your own posts and comments and then upvote each other - often on strictly Steem-related content, like this post by @dantheman. Meanwhile, really great writers and quality content contributors have to resort to vote-begging and bribes just to make a few pennies and get any attention whatsoever. As it stands, this platform is everything that it shouldn't be. But where are the whales who actually want to correct it, instead of simply vote themselves and their own buddies large sums of money while complaining about the others who do so?
Or am I just way off base here and not actually seeing what I continually see?
Damn, who's getting bribed for votes and how do I get in on this action? I kid, I kid...
P.S. - I like coffee.
Coffee is a serious matter. No kidding allowed :D
On a less flippant note, heavy corruption is a type of "economy", too. It is very apparent in certain countries as I have seen while working on projects there.
If bribery works, I would expect it to become a standard aspect of the Steem(it) economy.