I've decided to sit back and watch and see how things go before I put any more content up here. I'm not interested in votes as money but I am interested in engagement and coming to a place with truly interesting content. When I log in and scroll through trending posts for an hour, only to find nothing interesting at all, and look at my posts that have 4 votes and are totally buried, I can't help but think, "Not my crowd."
I had hope that the new user registration stop was an effort to get things back in check but that doesn't seem to be the case as trending is filling right back up with posts that make me think, "Who cares?" and it's the same whales voting them up there. If it's the site's mission to grow regardless of quality of content, it's not something I want to be a part of.