I'm pretty sure that the main reason for that is due to complexring being a whale already, with about $1 million of vesting STEEM. So all he has to do is post, upvote his own post, have his whale friends upvote his post and voila, instant publicity in the trending section where all the little fish continue showering it with upvotes. I've seen this happen with seriously crap posts also (like links to virtual reality youtube videos pulling in $7,000, seriously?), and as long as it gets publicity from whale votes it will make huge bank. This can also be seen when someone posts breaking news about steemit and no one notices because it's instantly buried by other crap, but then a whale comes along 3 hours later and posts it and pulls in $10,000+.

That's the part of the system that I think is seriously broken right now.