Have you noticed that as soon as you post something new that includes a steem or steemit tag it quickly gets a lot of votes like 30-40 or something, but at the same time your earnings remain at $0.00. At the same time if you post a different article that does not contain any of these tags it gets fewer votes, but they actually count and increase your earnings for the post.
The reason for that seems to be a number of bots that are following posts with #steem or #steemit tags and upvote them immediately as they get published with the idea to make some profit if the posts get popular and featured on the main page. This however essentially kills things for the post publisher, so my advice... just try not to use these tags and thus avoid the bots upvoting your content and rely on actual users on steemit.com
It seems that there are also some bots that instead of voting up downvote or flag publications for some users, or at least such reports are being posted…