<p>The question is asking about rich-get-richer at the level of users (high rep users getting undeserved attention as they get higher rep). I'll address that first, but I'll then discuss a slightly different issue.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>The effect may exist, but if it did, I'd presume that my upvotes per post would be higher now than it was say three or so years ago.</p>

<p>I don't think it has gone up at all in that time. (It did go up for a while when I first started answering questions regularly, but the average quality of my answers was improving; once that more-or-less plateaued, I don't think anything changed much since). </p>

<p>If anything, even without a rich-get-richer phenomenon, that average should have gone up simply because a larger proportion of my answers are old - and they still accumulate some votes over time, so unless my new answers are getting less attention than they used to, upvotes per answer should tend to increase a little anyway, and I think they've actually gone down a bit). </p>

<p>I guess the decrease may partly be having spent a bit on bounties, but that's not <em>all</em> that much -- it might explain the small decrease, and maybe even just a tad more than that -- which even if that adjustment resulted in an underlying  small increase, it would be so small as to be easily consistent with the increasing age of my average post.</p>

<p>So for me at least I don't know that there's any indication of rich-get-richer, but if there is one in my case it must be <em>really tiny</em>.</p>

<p>Maybe others have seen more of an effect. </p></li>
<li><p>However, amoeba (in comments below) raises the problem at the level of questions and there I think there is perhaps more of an issue. Some of my answers get more attention than they seem to deserve while other (clearly better in several senses) answers languish; and numerous other people have recognized a problem at that level. So while we might be ending up about right on average (if the informal analysis under point 1. of my average points per answer as my reputation rose is not atypical), that doesn't mean the best posts are always well recognized.</p>

<p>For that I can suggest a few things:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>where you can, look at all the answers, not just the top few </p></li>
<li><p>try varying the sort order for answers using the choices at the top of the set of answers (e.g. to look at "active"):</p></li>
</ul>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/tqcpv.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/tqcpv.png" alt="Image showing the answer-list sort order links"></a></p>

<ul>
<li><p>keep your eye open for low-voted answers that are gems and upvote them</p></li>
<li><p>give bounties to especially noteworthy answers</p></li>
</ul></li>
</ol>
