I recall reading the white paper as closely as I could manage to understand it eight months ago when I first dove into Steemit. It did seem to be an eye opening, optimistic document. However it was also pretty honest about what a long-shot it would be to achieve major success:

Taking popularity as a rough measure of value, then the value of each individual item is given by Zipf’s Law. That is, if we have a million items, then the most popular 100 will contribute a third of the total value, the next 10,000 another third, and the remaining 989,900 the final third. The value of the collection of n items is proportional to log(n).
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The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people overestimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.

It's basically saying, "Most people are going to contribute a lot more work than they're going to be compensated for, because they believe there's a small chance of striking it rich.

So, points for honesty. I dove in anyway, since the small chance of some compensation was better than the zero chance I was getting on Facebook or on my personal blog, and I feel compelled to write, anyway.

It also shows that being consistently active on here is the only clear way to success. You've got to play the lottery a lot of times before you ever win a thing. And at least it doesn't cost anything except for our time to be able to buy a daily ticket, or three.