many extraordinary posts that day are going to bite the dust being shadowed by that celebrity
Somewhat, but that is oversimplified and contributes to a zero-sum mentality. Yes it is true that the pool is literally zero-sum as long as the STEEM price doesn't change, but the effect is pretty modest. Currently the reward pool is about $100 000 per day. On the day he made $15K, approximately $85K went other posts. If you didn't earn, it is because your post didn't gain an audience and get votes. It is not because TDV took all the money.
In fact there is concrete proof of this. If I recall correctly, the very same day that TDV got $15K, the Playmate got $12K (sorry if not exact number). His success did not prevent her from also doing well nor did her success stop him from doing the same. And despite both of them getting historic payouts on the very same day, 73% of the reward pool was still available for other posts.
If your posts aren't getting rewarded, focus on marketing and promoting to develop an audience and improving the quality of the posts to increase conversions (how many people who see the posts vote for them). Pointing at someone else who is (in some vague sense) responsible for you not geting 15% of the reward pool rather than focusing on why you aren't getting a piece of the other 85% and what you can do to change that is doing yourself a disservice.
That is correct @smooth, TDV's post didn't take all the money. The point was that if you hit your hard worked post in a day where a couple celebrities do theirs (or some new app comes on/gets updated), there are way less chances to get yours noticed. I'm not complaining. Used to when I was starting up on Steemit but not anymore. Perseverance is my motto now. Keep at it and you'll get noticed. Contribute (on steemit with posts, comments, curation, on steemit.chat helping people), grow an audience, and then you'll get noticed easier once you build your rep.
In this post @steve-walschot was bringing to discussion celebrities that do repetitive, similar posts, grabbing the attention on Steemit over the same idea over and over. I agree that we need to build our audience, but we can be easily shadowed by others who have a natural big audience. Yup, 73% was left. For 49.999 Steemians :)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that I'm not getting rewards, that is not why I, and many other are on Steemit for as their main goal.
PS. Maybe I'm mistaking but the total amount of steem awarded in a day is 28,800 STEEM (?) which is about $ 56k at the current price. Not that it makes a big difference in what you said.
The reward pool earns 2 STEEM per block, so that is 57 600 STEEM/day. A maximum of 25% of that goes to voters, but that is reduced in practice because authors vote for themselves (by default in the UI) and by the penalty for voting within the first 30 minutes. This might be slightly less than $100K now with the reduced STEEM price (though it was higher when TDV made his first post), but still reasonably close.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying it.
If you're ok with 2 posts receiving 27% of the daily award, an intro post and a playmate post, you're an idiot.
You nailed it! Couldn't have said it better.
What if those 2 accounts brought in 27% (or more) of the new Steemit users during that time?