The limitation is there to stop old popular content to keep getting money forever. Before there were two periods: one payout after 7 days and one after 30 days.
Steem has a lot of rules that are way different than twitter or facebook. I don't think that what will drive off people. It is more about the way the platform is use, the fact that people read less content while wanting to be read more. I thik there is a very low user engagement here.
Right now I'm pretty new here, I browsed Steem for a few days, and only after those few days I discover 'resteem', then that I cannot do it, then the limit, then got infuriated by its apparent silliness, then I read your explanation and it makes perfect sense.. No millions of points for Doge picture or RainbowCat etc just because they keep popping up from the history.
However, 7 days seem very harsh. Previous 7/30 sounds better to me (I'm a slow writer.. when I write something on my old site, people tend to notice it after a month or two maybe..), but probably there was some important reason why that was changed..
Anyways - many thanks for the explanation. This should be clearly indicated on Steem tutorials!
Well good luck around here. The documentation misses a lot of things so you might need to dig a lot to get answers.
Anyway welcome here :-)