Bandwidth Limit Exceeded - It's not easy being a minnow

I recently created a new account, with just 3 STEEM and no delegation. I haven't officially announced that yet so I'm gonna gloss over the account itself (if you look, please don't comment here and wait for my announcement) and instead focus on the real issue here: bandwidth!

I tried to post and was reminded of something I haven't seen in awhile after growing my account and building some SP.

I wondered where my bandwidth was at so I checked at steemd.com

Ah ok, 235 hours? Sure, I can wait a week and a half.

The best part is that I hadn't posted, commented, upvoted, or done anything for 16 hours at this point. And then I remembered this handy post talking about the reserve ratio and this handy tool that tracks this useful metric and and I saw what I expected.

This is exactly what was described in that post. Basically, the reserve ratio drops and tiny minnows run out of bandwidth, through no fault of their own.

Fortunately, I have this account which is by no means large but certainly big enough to delegate 5 SP to the new account, which solved the problem for me.

The larger issue here is the brand new minnows who show up, eyes glazed over with confusion as they work to read a ton of material to understand how everything works, and then when they are finally ready to post, they get an error talking about bandwidth that likely spirals into frustration and outright abandonment.

I'm glad this is being talked about and possible solutions considered. I'm writing this post to continue to raise awareness and show some real world examples of how this plays out.

If we want to continue welcoming new members to our community, we need to help them avoid plain errors like this that would take an hour of reading to understand. The learning curve here is insane and this is one obvious factor that would slow the enthusiasm of anyone.

I hope we can find a solution to this in the near term or our growth will definitely slow.