Almost impossible to get rewards now. Any account with steem power is heavily incentivized to self-vote (or vote in their own circle of accounts). When the average user can't earn more than $0.04 for a post, they will bail. A lot of people stayed on Steemit because of the hope of getting that great post noticed and upvoted. But with 14k posts per day and the self-voting behavior, it's almost impossible to earn.

Great content is getting peanuts and crappy content from high SP accounts self-voting (along with their followers upvoting, hoping the high SP account will show some love to one of their posts) = beginning of the end.

Wait until the whales start powering down and price of steem will tank. It's unfortunate.

TLDR: Little guy can't earn, has little hope of earning. Only people powering up are those investing $10k + and taking big gamble. Whales and dolphins self-vote to earn 50% a year and beat 10% inflation rate.