Neither is tiny (therefore the supply is not per-determined)
Tiny as compared to the total supply, which it is (at least in terms of STEEM).
No, it is absolutely both.
I said it's both. But in the design of an economy that increases its monetary supply over time (like all real-world economies), they rely on growth to not have tremendous indvalidation of their currencies. This is exactly what hasn't happened here. Having a supply-increase rate of 7% yearly doesn't matter much, if demand for that currency increases faster. Every successful startup would show growth rates of above 50% yearly, and likewise most of these inflationary cryptoeconomies make such an assumption.
If the economy fails to grow as quickly as hoped / anticipated, price will go down. Obvisouly, STEEM was very hyped (much above its fair value) end of 2017, but there simply aren't enough drivers to motivate people (and I mean real people!) to start buying STEEM at a larger scale.
Seeing empty posts pushed to Trending multiple times a day will discourage anybody from buying STEEM ("This is what the stuff is good for?? Nah, thank you!"). Why not at least use this empty (but valuable) space to promote good Steem / crypto projects, curate great content or whatever. This is why I really don't get the appreciation both these projects receive.
Okay, and such tremendous invalidation is a benefit to no one. It destroys the existing investment and also destroys the resources available within the community to actually build (or even sustain) anything.
If we aren't growing enough to more than offset the cost of 7% inflation (and we clearly aren't, since we aren't really growing at all, and pretty much never have apart from a few short burst secondary to price spikes), then 7% inflation is too high. It makes a lot more sense to preserve capital until such time as we can fix the growth model, rather than waste it.
Indeed, what little of a growth model we have seems dependent on favorable price action. All the more reason to be skeptical of continually flooding the market with new coins.
That's under consideration. It is potentially an added benefit from the use of the space, but there is also very little evidence that "Trending" is a true growth driver (or valuable), despite the claims being made here (your implied claim included). In fact, it is mostly a leaderboard and something that some Steem insiders care about a lot about and the rest of the world not so much. It is perfectly fair for investors to vote to take a gain in lower inflation (burnpost) or a better-functioning stable value coin (sbdpotato, and also sometimes burnpost) over a prettier trending page (and also fair to vote the opposite).
Another excellent bit of market evidence that Trending space is not worth much is that no one has ever been willing to pay (e.g. bidbots) much of a premium to trend. As a thought experiment, if I were to auction off the space in the burnposts, how much do you think I would get? All evidence suggests, to me, that it would not be enough to even be worth the effort.
IMO trending prettiness is just not that important. Feel free to disagree and vote accordingly though.
I can tell that being shown under Trending does indeed generate a lot of clicks, and therefore reads, and thereby is significantly more valuable than not being there. The absolute value of these views / reads is debatable, and overall traffic, no matter where, in the crypto space is generally low.
I can only reiterate what I've been suggesting for hardly anybody could ever live off the payouts at such a low price.
I don't know exactly what such a Steem(it) would look like nowadays, but it would definitely take more example in the existing incumbents of content and media which have attracted a vast audience without any monetary expectations (at least as they were a similar size as Steem is now).
Maybe this would be very disappoining for investors in STEEM, but in the short-term price matters too little. STEEM price will only reach new sustainable ATHs if Steem grows significantly. I would advocate on spending the time and energy on building better clients (e.g. use-case specific, or offer whitelabel discussion platforms that can be curated using Steem Engine tokens or SMTs), or improving the protocol (e.g. work on improved Sybil attack resistance if that is considered a huge problem).
That said, I shall probably stop discussing @sbdpotato and @burnpost now myself and just let everyone do whatever they deem is best for the network, even if I think they're wrong. At least I gotta admit that it's well-intended :-)
Thanks for the input. I will say that people do work on building better clients, etc. and these initiatives in no way take the place of that work. They are parallel efforts to attack the issue of sustainable (and, going forward, more than merely sustainable, but successful) Steem economics from multiple angles.