RE: The Reward Pool for Morons - It's a Bid Bot Stupid!
I guess the main problem boils down to the following: Our goal should be to strive to grow the community and to produce more quality content than the previous day each time. Each piece of quality content should in theory back some of the monetary value Steem has. Because there's more quality content added on Steem every day generating more currency doesn't cause the currency to lose its value, in fact we seem to produce enough quality content to increase its value in the long run.
However the algorithm doesn't reward us for having more quality content relative to other days. A day with only mediocre content will generate the same amount of Steem as a day with ton of really high quality content, so instead of having the goal to create more quality content every day in order to all benefit from it, we're just competing against each other for the same share, hoping we can increase the share we get. Ignoring all spam and misuse of the platform for a second and ask: Shouldn't the work of 40.000 people be worth more than the work of 1000?
I don't think this about envy, it would just be easier to accept someone's exceptionally high income, if it didn't mean your chances, your influence, every person you upvote they all suffer from someone them taking such a large part of the share.
Currently the system seems to promote growth only on a per individual level. You're not looking to grow alongside others, you're just looking to grow faster than the average user, because just growing at an average rate will not increase your power.
This is exactly how Steem got into this problem in the first place... when Steem only had 1000 people, those people were getting huge amounts of Steem by the way it was distributed, but no one really had any concerns because Steem was only worth about $0.10... now that it's worth more, we're still generating the same amount of Steem per day, but it's distributed amongst many, many more people... but those super early adopters are very much influencing the payouts today.
Ideally the amount of Steem generated each day would increase with the activity (transactions) but because that didn't happen we now have this issue. Very insightful @uber-dragon!
You're right, there's always going to be those days that are more full of great content than other days, but that's why we need to strive to create consistently quality content. I spend hours writing content that 90% of the time gets less than 10$ in upvotes every so often I get a nice upvote and the reward is bigger, but I figure if I keep bashing out good content it all ads up eventually!