It's getting harder to sweep dust .. trying burnsteem25

Last week I received a note and transfer from @dustsweeper saying that Dusty's dustsweeping service was finally shutting down.

It appears that the account had stopped sweeping dust a year or so ago.

I was saddened to receive the official notification nonetheless.

In my opinion, Dusty was one of the few bright spots on SteemIt. If you studied curation rewards on the platform; you would notice that a large number of upvotes appear to be automated with the rewards going to voting circles.

Accounts not in the voting circles rarely receive awards.

Dusty used to work as follows: Accounts would send funds to dusty. Dusty would use the funds to upvote posts that had rewards but that were under the $0.02 cut off. Employing Dusty's services assured that you and the small curator accounts that upvoted your posts would get a reward.

BurnSteem25 Might be a Replacement for Dusty

The #burnsteem25 project might be a decent alternative to dusty. Apparently one needs to set @null as a 25% (or higher) beneficiary of the post. The author then needs to use the tag #burnsteem25 .

I scanned through posts using the tag. Most of the posts received a reward. There were some spammy posts that received downvotes.

SteemIt Rewards are Extremely Unbalanced

My one complaint about #burnsteem25 is that the reward system is already skewed on SteemIt.

The idea behind #burnsteem25 is that small accounts must giver 25% of their rewards to get a payout.

Whales, on the other hand, get 100% of their upvote. Whales are usually in voting circles with other whales. Whales get a bigger reward and receive a higher percent of the reward.

The #burnsteem25 project amplifies an inequity.

Sweeping Dust from the Kindness of One's Heart

I think the best approach for the dust problem is for dolphins to sweep the dust gathering on plankton accounts.

If I were a dolphin on a STEEM like blockchain; I would make a point of upvoting posts of small accounts.

Steem Block Explorer reports reports that my 100% upvote is worth $0.004 . I can reliably sweep the dust of posts with $0.017 in upvotes.

Egads, it currently takes 4450 STEEM to have a $0.02 upvote!!!

I wish the price of STEEM would rise so that I could do more. I generated the image for this post with Night Cafe. Here are the images I generated for SteemIt. #ai-images are considered to be near public domain. Feel free to use it in your posts.