Yup, that's true, and not all newbies get noticed - which is inevitable, but often, at least to me, it looks like that quality is not what's making the difference between being curated and being not.
Also, the lack of support for mid-level guys is often what leads lots of users to leave the platform, while user retention is a key element for the success of Hive. I'm not saying that being a "mid-level" stackers should automatically entitle you to get upvotes, but only that I agree with you that there's some sort of "hole" when coming to curation towards users:
- big-level users often upvote each others and get a lot of attention from people who hope to get back an upvote for their engagement and support; also, there are some big-level users who objectively post very high quality content and deserve all of the upvotes they get;
- small-level users are usually supported by curation projects whose aim is exactly that;
- mid-level users... well, they are a bit left on their own, and if they don't have the patience and perseverance to find different ways to get some support (i.e. challenges, calls to action, some specific tags which boost your chances to get upvoted), they will most-likely become less active and, eventually, even leave the platform.
I've seen quite a bunch of users leaving because their work wasn't getting any love... and when you see that your post, full of effort, decently translated, and well formatted gets less upvotes and engagement that that one post poorly written and translated, posted form mobile without any formatting or any useful content inside, which the author him/herself auto-upvoted and no one seems to care, your morale and willingness to improve can become extremely low.
Wow!!! How can you be so accurate!!
I guess being here for long made you understand how all of these happens.
I wish I knew how things work here on Hive 😅 but I've seen many good users leaving the platform because their effort wasn't recognised and/or appreciated.