I think that, once an certain author become unprofitable (negligible) for the curators (because they are all fighting each other to be first voter), they will simply move on to another Author, and then the cycle begins again.
I believe we will see this cycle continuing, with Curators moving on once rewards tend to zero, and there are better opportunities elsewhere. Authors will go through a boom and bust cycle, the curators move on to greener pastures...
For this reason, certain Authors earning 000's for each post is unsustainable IMO
The vast, vast majority of authors earn nothing .. zilch .. zippo .. nadia .. and there is no way to increase holdings or voting power through curation - there are no substantial rewards for curation for the vast majority who have relatively low SP - basically, they can write and curate for 10 years, and make sweet fuck all!
If we have 100 000 people in here, all with no voting power, who are also doing what the Whales are doing, but on a smaller scale, upvoting their "friends list" - which will amount to upvoting their favorite fellow broke ass people, then the situation will be fundamentally unchanged. We will all be sitting around, getting 12 cents per post, at the most, thinking about the good old days, when some guy posted the same damn statistics every day, and earned hundreds of dollars .. EACH AND EVERY DAY!
Let's get fucking REAL here!
I like that you say how you feel with no qualms. Got my vote for genuineness.
There certainly needs to be either;
We can see that @ned is considering option based on his last post. I believe it will take a combination of the 2 points above to move us forward to a more sustainable Steemit Curation model..
This is untrue. When the payout feed worked I use to watch it. A good percentage earn literally 0.00 but it isn't a vast, vast majority, it is more like 70-80%. A very high portion of that is junk that deserves no more.
There are decent posts that go though to payout with >0 but <1.00 of reward by earning only weaker votes, but not a huge number of actually decent posts that get zilch.