Yes, it is a challenge as it is totally new. Nothing like it has ever existed before. This means it also has new problems. Those people self-up voting their own comments have been noticed. It will not go well for them in the long run if they keep at it. I'd not worry too much about them. Keep writing things you enjoy to write. Many of my early posts made $0. This was at a time when people getting over $10,000 for a post was not uncommon. I just kept writing. I stopped worrying about how to make money. I instead worried about what I wanted to write about next. I wrote about whatever inspired me, and if it made money great, if it didn't I still had something of me stored in the blockchain. Some of my personal favorite posts I wrote made almost nothing, and some of them did make nothing.