I am looking at mining steem instead where the reward is 90% while content sharing is 10%. Think it will suit me better to provide mining resources than to write and post. Honestly for content posting i am better off monetizing with adsense. However in terms of activities and meeting new people steemit has certainly serve its usefulness.
oh man, I wish I knew how to mine and get in on that. but, those sort of technical aspects aren't my forte - such my opportunity lies in writing; and for others, it may lie in curation or creating other kinds of content. though of course, mining is a fundamental value required for the whole system to work - so by all means, the rewards that are there for it are well-deserved for those who've learnt how to play that game and have dedicated themselves to providing that service to the community.
most of the money has gone out of mining. After block 800K something, mining rewards got cut down to 1/10th of what they were.. thats why blocktrades and the badger guy were trying to sell off their miner accounts.
my 8 core vps instance gets 40K hashes /sec, and typically gets 1 or 2 POWS (worth 1 steem) a day. I think higher ranked witnesses get more POW opportunities, but im not sure exactly how it works.
but if youre just talking about setting up a rig and letting it run, its probably not going to pay for itself.