Well, think of it this way. If someone puts a lot of effort into a post it can take a considerable amount of time to finish. One of first posts I created was about a trip to southern Italy to a town called Polignano a Mare. I took hundreds of photos and picked out the ones that I thought were the best.
I took the best RAW images and painstakingly cropped them and processed them in Lightroom in order to make them look the best that they could look. Then I exported them as jpegs. I wrote a nice story and description of my trip, and captioned the images nicely.
To make a long story somewhat short, I spent quite a few hours putting it all together. That post got 4 upvotes, and earned exactly $0. I'm not saying that to complain; but had someone like you seen it, you could have given it a 100% upvote, (if you liked it) which would have compensated me for hours of work. Even at $25, that's not a lot of money for the amount of work put in.
So I would argue that as a whale, you have the opportunity to go out there and find great content. You can look at it and see the amount of thought and effort that the author put into it, and decide whether or not they deserve an hour or two's wage for their effort.
Of course this comment is not meant as a complaint, I am perfectly fine with the organic growth that I've been experienced over time as a member of Steemit. I am a 'Dolphin' myself, and with my little influence this is how I approach up-voting. Just my 2 cents!
I've been wondering about the value too, my first couple posts were not much value and also not much time spent (I was just sharing links to articles I found valuable).
Then I tried sharing some art that I had created, a drawing and a poem. It's been about 4 days, 1 vote from someone who was very kind.
Yesterday I posted a much more detailed post about something I'm passionate about, that post has gotten 45 upvotes so far, but that equates to about .38.
As someone new to the platform, there's no real understanding of how this vote value actually works. Reading posts like this one are where I have to learn and I've read quite a few - each of them have differing views on how things should work and none of them actually give the whole picture.
Will I continue to invest lots of time creating posts if I don't have indications that there is a value? Probably not. How to get discovered by people who have voting power is a concern for me. How can groups be brought together beyond just using specific tags? How can you even know what tags make sense for your content?
First of all I need to ask, do you have any other experience with creating content which was appreciated by wide audience?
If Steem is for someone a first attempt to make good and popular content, then... everything can be really confusing. Truth is... that creating a good content is not easy in general and it is even more difficult in such difficult environment like Steem.
In my experience good content without proper marketing very rarely becoming popular. It happens but it requires tremendous amount of patience from author.
And a proper marketing of post... is a topic for whole series of posts (and for sure, I am not an expert about that)... but just for comparison... I can spend 8 hours writing post, and next 4-6 hours to promote it (very often I promote my post even before a publication, trying to find people, which would like to read what I am gonna to write).
Easiest thing would be to ask is there any place where very specific group of people already gathers. This is decentralized social media. People have chats, groups, discords, telegrams and dozens of different places.
Observe other authors, which tags they use, and.... ask best authors, which tag is best for your post. You could even have a line at the end of every you post, which says:
To answer your question, no, not a lot of experience. That's an excellent point.
Related to marketing, I think that's my bigger challenge. The confusion about how to market on this platform is a difficult learning curve. How to get started is certainly not apparent without randomly finding good posts at this point, since I have not yet figured out a good strategy to find the gems that I struggle to find now. What I've read so far can sometimes contradict.
Decentralization is a strength of this platform but also makes it very difficult to get started on it. I'm sure I'll get it figured out eventually, especially since people seem willing to engage.
So far your recommendation about how to pick tags is exactly how I've been doing it, so that's helpful to know there isn't some other special place I don't know about to find out what tags are effective.