In the past days, i saw a lot of articles where my friends are disapointed, because they don't understand the mechanism of rewards. This process is explained by steemit.

The main findings

  The most important principle is that everyone who contributes to a venture should receive pro-rata ownership, payment or debt from the venture. This principle is the same principle that is applied to all startups as they allocate shares at founding and during subsequent funding rounds.  

  The second principle is that all forms of capital are equally valuable. This means that those who contribute their scarce time and attention toward producing and curating content for others are just as valuable as those who contribute their scarce cash. This is the sweat equity principle and is a concept that prior cryptocurrencies have often had trouble providing to 2 more than a few dozen individuals.  

 Payout Distribution

 One of the primary goals of Steem’s reward system is to produce the best discussions on the internet. Each and every year 10% of the market capitalization of Steem is distributed to users submitting, voting on, and discussing content. At the size of Bitcoin this could be as much as $1.75 million dollars per day being given to top contributors. The actual distribution will depend upon the voting patterns of users, but we suspect that the vast majority of the rewards will be distributed to the most popular content. Steem weighs payouts proportional to n 2 the amount of Steem Power voting for a post. In other words, post x would receive a payout proportional to: 

                           votes[x] 2 / sum(votes[0…n] 2 square) 

SO it  dependends:

• of votting
• steem power voting 

 Zipf’s Law7 is one of those empirical rules that characterize a surprising range of real-world phenomena remarkably well. It says that if we order some large collection by size or popularity, the second element in the collection will be about half the measure of the first one, the third one will be about one-third the measure of the first one, and so on. In general, the k th-ranked item will measure about 1/k of the first one 

 Rewarding Parent Posts Good discussion requires back and forth posting. When you reply to someone else, they get 50% of any payout you receive in that thread. This rule applies up to 6 levels deep. Starting a big discussion greatly rewards the parent poster. 

Failure to properly nest your posts in the discussion is a good way to get down voted.

 This incentive structure motivates people to contribute in a way that motivates others to get involved. It encourages people to ask good questions so that others can provide valuable answers.

 Payouts

 When a post receives a payout it takes the form of 50% SMD and 50% SP. The Steem Power give the user increased voting and transaction power while the SMD gives the user an immediate benefit in a stable currency. As we’ve already discussed at length, both SP and SMD are designed to encourage long-term holding rather than short-term selling.