The only way to stop yourself being at the mercy of Whales is to Power Up and seek to make a return through curation, no one can take that away.
To add to that, one can also make thier own token and community that branches off like LEO/POB did.
It is pretty interesting seeing posts on LEO/PoB make more in terms of USD value than they do on Hive. With dozens or hundreds of communities as active as them we could see a bright future where decentralized communities are where people go who are looking for earning rewards for blogging as the primary reward, and Hive becomming less and less needed for rewards.
I'm sure that was the original idea.
Although with POB I'm not even sure who is behind it so I don't know if I can trust them to do the appropriate development.