I wrote about the inequity on two previous post and how I saw that its a down spiral.

The content need to be curated in order to be viewed and in order to be curated its needs to be upvoted and the voting powers is measure by how much you have on the SP, so in order to get you enough value you need a upvote boost which can only be obtained by the curating accounts that have a lot of SP in them, after which you are left with really few chances to get your articles out other than having a whale that upvotes your content and makes it viral.

I also investigated some of the things a few users have reported and it does seems to be a shady practice to obtain quick STEEM in the process. But why am I not leaving? Because even though with the little I have earned, I can actually have savings ( a job for a student in my country for a week is about 2SDB, that's 8 SDB a month) and that doesn't cover food nor medicine.

I enjoy the system but I wish there was a way to stop the abuse

And that's the final problem with decentralization, it requires consent on the users. To not be abusive on each other and not to abuse the system they inhabit.

I am gonna upvote you now for 0.1$ and I hope your post gets more credit , because this is a problem.