@fingolfin, i have nothing against personal stories or shared life experience. But  the thing is that i feel that personal stories and such can easily be faked. I also find it very disturbing when they use their reputation to write fake personal stories like this to win sympathy votes. My filter is that I usually do not upvote posts like these..
See this for example. https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@jesika/i-was-raped-on-my-wedding-night

@logic, So you think if there were no rewards people wouldn't care about these personal stories? There are no rewards for reading those "intellectually barren gossip magazines" yet they get infinitely more readers than a peer reviewed medical journal discussing possible cures for lupus. Now we can argue on whether that *should*  be the case, but there is no getting around the fact as a whole people care more about those stories than reading something of intellectual interest.

People should indeed write what ever they are passionate about. However at this early stage the whales should be trying to reward as many different sorts of posts as possible. They should not just focus on things they like.

They may be rewarded but not to such extent. Anyway, I can assure you that if there were no rewards, then very few would give a toss about some attention seeker or someone boasting about their life experiences. Reading such stuff amounts to reading intellectually barren gossip magazines.
These posts very seldom teach you anything of value.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@logic/steemit-as-direct-projection-of-delusion-of-american-dream

Laonie, also you are one of the whales, but you are doing things that others are not, you are directly sending SBD to new users, you are upvoting a lot of people, with a wide variety of opinions and on a wide variety of topics. Not everyone may see it, but I've looked and I know you are working hard to be a solution to the problem.

Please don't upvote this comment either. I just wanted you to know, that's all. :)

I cann't reply on your last post, so i reply here, You are right, it's human nature to vote for their friends first, i am one of the whales, i am one of the normal human, you cann't rely on me or other normal human to change, the rules need to be changed.

Great that you realize that but you are one of whales . I'm sorry for asking but what have you, actually done to change that? Aren't you doing exactly the same?
https://steemit.com/cn/@teamsteem/this-post-is-going-to-become-the-best-paid-post-today

I have checked steemstats and you have not voted on any regular suer post even once. Most of your upvotes within last 7 days have been carefully selected for the whales around here:: somebody, klye, fyrstikken, jasonmcz, thecryptofiend

@logic -- that might be true, but unlike most of the whales, iiuc laonie bought in with his own money after the price increase.  say what you want, the man has his money where his mouth is.  @laonie the biggest problem is that all the whales here are so busy developing the platform (almost all of them are whales because theyre the orig programmers/developers), that they only have time to  follow and vote on people that they know.  I hope you guys in #cn give it a chance.  China got btc where it is today, i was really pumped when you guys showed up.

@logic @laonie I think it is a combination of three things:

- Content filtering isn't working properly because voting rewards are so heavily weighted towards whales
- That isn't balanced out by wisdom of the crowds because people don't engage slowly with the content that is there (partly because it's hard to find and/or disappears too quickly).
- Content quality is, barring some exceptions, not enough to pull people in on its own - and rewards seem too random to justify the effort of posting long term.

I've started a series on using [graph theory](https://steemit.com/mathematics/@sunjata/almost-everything-you-need-to-know-about-using-graph-theory-to-build-the-steemit-network-part-1) to grow the Steemit network - at the moment, the trajectory Steemit is on is towards excessive centralisation, when it needs to be decentralising, and diversifying, the network to grow for the long term.

Time is also a big problem.  There are a few whales and I suspect they have little time so they tend to upvote what seems like it would be successful to them.  This should improve over time with better distribution but understandably that won't happen if people get scared away too soon.

Lol @logic now I'm a whale?  I'm just a fat minnow at best:)