I hear what you are saying here and see the problem. I haven't been on here long and resisted vote for vote requests for the most part (agreed to one or two while trying to figure out how to navigate this site). While I do hope to make money on this site to allow myself more opportunity to invest in blockchain projects I believe in, I am primarily interested in trying to get people involved in a conversation on here about the direction I see the cryptocurrency world going. I even offered to pay 1SBD for the best counterargument to my post, with no requirements to upvote, resteem or follow, but I am struggling to get people engaged. I'm guessing this is at least in part because I don't have many followers and the low number of votes on my post keep it low on the page of each of the tag lists. So how do we get people involved without artificially bumping up ratings (vote for vote) or spamming? Or is it just the case that you have to be actively posting, and interacting with others posts for many months or years before you can reach people?
Upvoted and following.
Thanks for the comment. It is a hard issue to get your name out there, especially where the site is currently at, its at a stage where most of the big names have been around for a while which seems to have made the site have an ecosystem similar to that of a secondary school, where you have all the cool kids (whales) who vote for each other and then the less popular kids (fish) who will try anything to be in the cool kids club but what they don't realize is if they just focused on themselves they would become part of their own cool group.
A rough analogy but the best I could think of for now. I think it is a matter of consistent posting with solid content and a bit of luck. Finding what you like to talk about and sharing honest opinions. Also stopping things like vote for vote as with vote for vote people don't actually look at posts so only already known people get noticed.
Sorry for not replying sooner @thedialectic