That's because Steem is an unfair system. Only the rich survive in this game. I wrote an article about it in hopes to shed light on the major flaw. If Steem changed it's calculation for upvote count Haejin would still be on top because of his subsriber base and upvotes.
https://busy.org/@guntotnhippie/haejin-berniesanders-and-randomwhale-oh-my-a-steem-failure