This is not true, you can easily look at hivebuzz ranking to see that it's plenty distributed. Whales acting in nefarious reasons can be countered easily and it can cost them social repercussions and potential earnings/opportunities down the line.
We've seen how whales who do nothing of value are treated at times with cases like trasnsisto/newsflash where most people, except a few hoping for a quick vote would just ignore them, compared to say whales like theycallmedan who build valuable things are respected on here and end up doing really well.
Well we can clearly see azircon abusing many users and engaging in vote trading. If he didn't have money, he would never get to so those things or get the amount of votes he gets on his posts.
There's also nothing I can do to ever get a post that isn't DVed to 0 now.
You could prove that there is demand to read your posts and people who have a good track record to want to defend you from downvotes.
I don't see azircon trading votes anywhere.
Anyone can look and see many upvotes on my posts. Some are automatic but many aren't and I've had comments about how people learned from my games. I'm not going to keep making posts that take significant effort while earning 0. And not just earning 0 but also reducing the curation rewards my upvoters get.
As for azircon trading votes, that's his favorite past time after nuking everyone he doesn't like.
Look at these comments all upvoted in 100% by galenkp:
I don't have computer access to take a better look right now but there are some people he always or almost always votes for and they do the same for him.
And yet my $13 a week, most of which came from Splinterlands' contests, are apparently a problem, even though they take much more effort than his posts (any of them farm more hive than all my posts from one week).