Hi @kevinwong
I am one of the older steemians on this platform, however, I never invested any of my own money into steem, I just reinvested my earnings. The posts I write receive around 100 votes (although I have about 3500 followers) and earn around $4.00, of which about $2.00 is from my own voting. I write between 1 and 2 posts a day, and I think I have the longest running series on steemit. I don't write mainstream posts, as I mostly write on religion and beer (strange combination). As you can see that if I don't vote for myself I will not earn much. I believe that the buying of votes should however be stopped, as this is against content receiving votes on merit. (I see people who just joined in this month, with almost no followers on the trending pages, with mostly bot votes) I also don't think curation rewards should be coupled to the payout of the post, as this makes people to vote for traditionally high earning authors, thus just running after the crowd, like sheep. For me to do well on curation, I should not support new people, but should just follow the trending people. Perhaps there could be a different way of rewarding curation.
Thank you for your posts on this subject, I hope things will improve, I still love the platform!!