I tried a year or two ago to create a reward incentive program on Steem through a different steem account, where people would submit content by using a tag, the best content would be combine into a daily post, with a monthly lottery that randomly rolled 3 winners for a steem reward.

My experience from that nearly year-long experiment concluded that most steem users who participated were genuine, although I would say 10-20% were plagiarizing deliberately to participate, and my blocked user list was massive for it. The rest of the participants were genuine and couldn't believe it when they won the monthly lottery and had their work showcased.

But, it was unsustainable on its own. At first it was sustainable and user upvotes kept the system afloat. But as time progressed the power of thousands of user upvotes barely amounted to anything, and so I created a seperate pool of Steem that I used to buy upvotes on the daily showcase posts in the hopes to get more exposure and more upvotes to pay for the monthly reward, but bumping the post reward up into the realm of $100+ did nothing to bring in more votes or views.

I ended the experiment because steem itself did not work in a way that it logically should, and large whales soaked it all up. This is how it works in the real world, so monetarily there is little reason for a new user to believe that their work into the platform will reward them in any manner, and my own experience backs that up.

It seems this hardfork attempts to address some of these problems, and it will be interesting in the years to come to see where the Steem ecosystem ends up.