I perfectly understand your point when it comes to Steem price. The higher price, tougher it gets to earn Steem. With increasing number of Steemit members it gets even tougher.

Something is off. The payouts are going down yet the STEEM price is not so low.

I agree with you! For some people it’s hard to admit, but one of the reasons it’s much tougher now is delegation to voting bots. I noticed many people are not only powering down, more and more people also delegate to voting bots. This leads to lower numbers of real people voting the contents. This also leads to lower curation rewards. Most of the rewards go to voting bots. They don’t even upvote you within first 30 min. where you could get most of the curation rewards and if the do, they upvote you with $1.5 for every 1.00 sbd you pay them. They are getting more and more greedy, like it or not.
When it comes to record paid content, I say “WOW”. Unfortunately forget about it today, unless you buy votes, it’s imposible to get this number.
Great post though!