Humbling stuff. If minnows right now think it's hard to earn steem, just wait a few more years until the reward pool is even lower and there's 10x as many users to split it between...
We might be at the beginning of the transition away from Steemit as a major income stream opportunity, and towards the "micropayments / beer money" phase. Eventually, if there are gonna be millions upon millions of users, only a very scarce few will earn serious money from the blogging...
Content will need to be even better, more engaging, worth viewing on its own merits, as the shift takes place.
The great thing about the Steem blockchain is we can adjust the variables it runs on to compensate for growth. I think we will eventually increase the inflation rate to compensate for splitting between an increasing number of users.
IMHO, Steemit is at a critical juncture that will either see massive adoption or high attrition. The excitement that drives people to post, vote and comment is the financial reward (obviously). The community is great but the underlying drive has to remain or people will leave. As minnows discover they can't get more than a few cents per post without some great luck, they might drop out. Investors like myself looking to buy 10k steem start second guessing the long-term viability of the platform.
Bottom line is user growth drives increasing steem valuation. But the only way to get user growth is if new users have a chance to earn. We are near the tipping point of either greatness realized or the cliffs of doom.
Isn't it inevitable that, as the site has more and more users, the average payouts will be much lower?
Otherwise the site has to cap at a small size of creators... you can't have infinite creators and great payouts.
Perhaps the answer is in making the site work even when payouts are low.