In the Steem whitepaper it give a nice graph, where it shows most of the payouts to the best posts, and then a long tail. It even talks about the long tail quite a bit.
The actual Steem payout graph doesn't look like that nice picture.
What it looks like is a stair-step function. Where 100 minnow votes doesn't even get you up the first step. There is no long tail.
The problem is that the voting power is a exponential function. And this is placed on top of the exponential function that gives the highest payouts to the highest votes. Add on top of that the 0.001 cut off, and you get a stair-step function with no tail.
The easiest place to see this is in curation rewards. I, as a minnow, have to be on the ball, know what I am doing AND get lucky to get that 0.001 curation reward.
In comparison, a dolphin just has to be active, and a whale just has to vote to get curation rewards. (you see this in all the voting bots and payouts)
There is a super-sharp cutoff that is the 0.001 steem. The minnows are left out and the plankton might as well just forget it.
That said this is a fairly nice platform for blogging and getting feedback.
The piece that will be needed most for the interface going forward is sorting and filtering. Would someone please tell me where best to send information when I get the sort algorithms functioning in my head?
Thanks for aall the information, great reply! Its quite overwhelming to understand , if i get a chance i will try to check out the white paper again, im getting some money at least now on this post, but its been awhile! Hopefully things get better after November 16! Fingers crossed i really want the platform to succeed! Will keep powering up and hope for the best! Thaks so much! Steem on! ♨👍👌♨