Nobody likes to feel small.
Do people have a greater satisfaction feeling out of achieving something big? @snowflake
Game thinking can work on Steemit. Gamification, on the other hand works best when the rewards are intrinsic.
The arrow of time:
AdSense pays till the end of the life of the content or till the end of AdSense.
If @Steemit want writers for the long-term, the one month reward limit discourages migration from the AdSense universe.
For me (as a content provider), one of the weaknesses of Steemit is that my content effectively has "no value" beyond the first 24 hours. I know there are plans to change this to 7 days, but even so... this paradigm discourages the creation of "evergreen" content; information people will come here for two years from now, as a result of a Google search.
Does that matter? Well, it does, if we're interested in creating long term sustainability...
This is another important point. Unfortunately curation rewards incentivizes people to vote fast. If there was no curation rewards steem could have multiple periods where rewards are paid out, 7 days, 30 days, 6 months, 1 year, 2 year, 3 year, etc... A system like this could probably be made today but it would make no sense due to curation rewards.