Cannot but agree, there are steemit profiles where the stories are worse than mediocre but they receive 300$ worth of upvote for every post. If you compare them and some good authors on Medium (or even here) the difference is vast. Yet they somehow still get loads of comments and stuff. I was a bit angry about that in the beginning but now I just focus on my writing.
I've also seen some groups here on Steemit where there just upvote every article of each other no matter what it is. But well, that's their thing. My aim is to get better at writing and possible find some interesting people, which I did. You @raikuhen are one of them along with @donna-metcalfe and others.
RE: Don't compete with yourself for likes and upvotes