I don't think you're getting my point. I'm with you on earning, building, gaining... whatever. But the social-economic structure of steemit really pushes you towards only ine solution if you drop using bots, and that's circlejerking :) I mean we can keep pretending it's about community bla bla, but we all know it's about money and hierarchy.
You can get shitloads of human followers among these 65.000 active ones, but at the end of the day if you keep getting dozens of dust upvotes from plankton users it's not gonna cut it, cause the only ones that matter are these done with high upvote power.
I'm sure you get plenty of upvotes from plankton, but the ones that let you earn are from high SP accounts and I can bet a lot of people have you on autovote... and it's all good, you've been here for a while and you earned it, but you came in a different time, and now reality's very different!
I see a lot of valuable IMO posts, that earn pennies, although at the market price they should earn more... but then isn't the market price what the market is willing to pay? Well yes, which means if you can sway it your way, you're gonna get it right. And that's what steemit comes down to, you have enough power and crypto to push your content to the top and you circlejerk, you're gonna be a winner.
Sure, high quality content is hard to argue. We can evaluate it with golden standards of art, literature, journalism and blogging, but without a few whales/sharks/dolphins having your back it's meaningless!
And that's what I mean by no SP trickling down. Yes everybody prefers selling their votes or delegating, cause nobody gives a shit about integrity! But am I complaining? No, I'm just pointing at a fact!