You can consider Steemit a pretty decent reflection of reality in this sense. As a professional musician I constantly see shite get to fame and glory, take jobs they don't deserve and end with massive paychecks I could never dream of. Why? Because the old mantra: 'it's who you know, not what you know'.
Exact same thing applies here. Suck up to the right people and you get what you desire. Be an honest, hardworking blue collar and nothing else, and you rarely get anywhere (unless some twitter video goes viral and somebody boots up a kickstarter to support you)
Some of the greatest work in the world is locked away in museums where almost nobody goes - especially not for a price - to see them. The people are not searching for, nor rewarding, things based on objective quality standards, unfortunately. This is actually not so much a Steem problem as a human problem, imo
you have to post quality content like this
!popcorn
Every art abd discipline should have an audience I on the contrary stop by fine photography and art and music and less on crypto related or philosophy, we are all different and thatvis why we must be consistent building our feeds, but curating high quality speaks good of the pkatform as it soeaks badly rewarding low quality, though subjective we all can make thevñ difference of a shit post. Itbis true that networking builds up your possible rewards but high rep should not make you lazy knowing you get the cake anyway, up the ladder to help down the ladder, but it is not that way, usually
It is amazing that people expect different rules to apply here to reality. Income distributions on steemit are not fair; but neither is life. Steem is a reflection of the financial inequality which is already present in its user base, nothing more, nothing less. At least with an inflationary system there is a chance over time to reward hard work with upward mobility; which is a lot more than can be said with stratified financial systems which lock the lower classes out of the economy completely.