Hahahah I love this, but please allow me to prove you half wrong (while you are undoubtably half right). You are right that to a large portion of users, including the ones who ultimately decide the direction of this place, a lot of what goes on here is utter bullshit masquerading as whatever-the-fuck, sometimes malicious and sometimes deluded.
But....
Real community does exist here, perhaps in spite of the overall design which also caters to the less flattering side of human nature. Hoping for payout and being genuine are not mutually exclusive though. Some of us believe that you can offer your thoughts and opinions and outlook honestly and still be rewarded for them, and that the compensation doesn’t neccisarily make them any less sincere. If you pay attention to the right people (instead of the trending page, or the new page), you find a lot of people posting things which knowingly will not attract the most possible payout, sometimes risking being flagged by users who could crush them.
Some of us have used steemit as a means of self-assessment, allowing us to question our intentions and pushing ourselves to become more honest. If you want a list of those people, I can give you some of their names, they’d very much appreciate your upvote and probably haven’t noticed this post because they spend more time in discord getting to know each other.
I’ve made amazing friends here and I’m continuing to build together with them to see what good we can do here, recognizing every minute that self interest will always need to be kept in check, but confident that my interest and the interest of others don't need to contradict, and feeling no guilt about profiting from my output and experimentation here.
It’s important to recognize the problem and I could applaud you for doing that but you might see it as kissing ass. Instead I’ll say this, the same thing I would say to you if you were a tiny minnow, rather than sitting around and feeling like shit about the state we are in, that the place is hopeless, ask yourself what you can do about it. Due to the trickle down economics of steemit it should be easier for you to do something than a measly minnow, but even a minnow should try, because (you said it) this place is better than Facebook.
You don’t need to doubt whether I wrote this comment with the intention of getting an upvote. I will tell you outright. The answer is “I did and I didn’t.” I can be entirely honest about a topic which is of interest while still hoping for my own personal benefit. I try to have faith that even if most of the whales/dolphins don’t give a fuck, some will care enough to support what the honest ones among us are doing even if it’s not always in their direct personal interest to do so. Eventually more people will come to see that the well-being of the collective is in the best interest of the individual. When actions are both selfish and selfless in nature, they are neither, theycjust ARE.