After couple weeks on Steemit I saw wonderful posts and great content ignored and most people up-vote only posts up-voted by whales, so I was curious about that and have try to understand why, I have found a lot of reasons but I will keep it simple and tell you about the most important.
1/ People loose voting power after a few up-votes:
All users on Steemit have voting power, by the way you can check your upvoting power here: https://steemd.com/@USERNAME (change the word USERNAME by yours), and after every up-vote they loose a part of that power , I really don't care about it I just up-vote good content.
2/ People want to see money on the first up-vote:
The first up-vote should be yours and people run after posts with some money on new posts, they think always about steem power they will get if that post become famous, I don't car I up-vote what I like.
3/ People up-vote posts on Active & Trending pages not New page:
I don't know if you have noticed that Steemit first page is the trending page, most of people are running after Steem power and they think they will be rich by doing that, I do that when I start using steemit but not anymore.
4/ People don't read content:
Most of people don't read content they read only title and some words because some posts are too long to read or they just want to make some money, I read if the content is interesting.
5/ Stupidity, Jealousy, hates, Racism ...
It's human nature we can do nothing with that, some of them down-vote your post not just ignored.
I hope that posts help you and be well.