Steem is a totally controlled by the Whales here, and it's like monopoly of few people having good reputation score & thousands of dollars in steem power.... even if they sneeze they create a post that they sneeze 3 times & that post earns more than 500% bucks as compared to a Very Good Articles posted by the Minnows. We have many examples just search it through & you will find out how much whales in steem are earning without any proper writing skills & what's happening with the minnows & Good Article writers whose very well written articles never be seen in trending..... Minnows are paying to different Whales to get some useless votes for nothing else.... First they Upvote on particular post with the strength of 70%, and then after some time they decrease it to 1% as I cross checked few Upvotes on www.steemnow.com, thanks to them.
And because of these few black sheeps Steem is losing Its worth & the good people !
It's anyone's votes, so I don't think there's anything wrong. In Bitcoin, all users are essentially voting for themselves 100% of the time. Here there's the convenient option of staking others up. But yeah I'd agree votes should be given out more although it's quite hard to fault anyone for just voting for their inner group. Not everyone's into handing money to total strangers.