This morning, I sent a message to @arcange, which begins as follows: “Here’s a sad scene for you. About 4 people have read this post I made about 3 days ago: “Can you supply some block-chain data for payment?”. Your post suggests that there must be or than 20 people in the community who might have been alerted to my post, and some would have promptly sent me to your service, which clearly needs to be well supported. New Steemit posts disappear into ‘ether’ [after] 20 minutes, and will turn up on peoples’ Feeds only if they are Following the authors!”

As someone above has said, communities of interest need to be identified, and posts related to Community-of-Interest-X need to be advertised among those members, regardless of who is the author.

Sorry to dwell on this; but it is a key problem. SMTs may solve it; but that process will be very slow in the best of all worlds. It would be a lot faster just to fix the Steemit software; but we can see that the economics of the latter are less compelling for Steem Inc.

Here’s my ‘two cents’, along with my big “thank-you” to the author.

We are now just over a week past the post date, and the payout is $35! Everyone should hang their heads in embarrassment on seeing $35 offered for work of this quantity and quality. So let us all get on our knees and pray that this wonderful author is not even thinking about payout levels here at Steemit, and has succeeded in finding other more helpful rewards from her contributions.

It appears that these days, on average, that your curation/commenting work will be only slightly less “rewarding” than your posting work. That, folks, is very bad news if we expect to see a lot of people coming in with valuable ‘green’ content that takes many hours to produce (like this post). I am ready to bet $100 (fiat money) that the rate of flow of this kind of content (standardized for new-member growth somehow) will go down dramatically as we go forward.

Even $200 on a post I might make that is ‘fully green’ and brings unusual value to the table after three-plus days of data mining etc. is not a great motivator for many authors -- nice but not great. Here’s my point. The designers of the system need basic re-education on what drives authors of difficult ‘green’ content (often with inherently small audiences) to bring their stuff to the table.

Let’s add these observations, so that we all look at the problem squarely in the eye. (1) A YouTube giant came in here with his followers and on his first post, containing little ‘green’ content, he reaped a $15,000+ payment. (2) Another YouTube giant recently arrived with a paraphrase of five short paragraphs from an article that he published in Wired, and within an hour his expected payout and reached close to $700. I could not find anything particularly ‘green’ in the content of those five paragraphs. (3) Another YouTube person reposted her video explaining block chains along with a few expository paragraphs, and within an hour the payout exceeded $130. There are now tons of articles and books on block chains out there in the wild. (4) Yesterday in an interview posted on YouTube, one of the lead engineers in developing Steem declared that our voting system was being ”abused” -- that was the word he used.