RE: Is there an ugly truth behind Steemit? This article tries to make the case:
I have now read the white paper, page 20: https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf
But it's not written there that the "house", i.e. the steemit company, gets 90%. What is written is, that out of a million of items (i.e. blog posts as far as I understand), the most popular 100 get 33,3% of the value, and the next 10.000 get another 33,3% and the rest of the 989.900 get the last 33,3% of value. So the 1% most popular posts get 66,6% of all value.
So it is indeed very hard to make serious money here. You need to belong to the top 1% of the most popular posters.
Additionally the owners of steemit and their friends seem to hold 87% of Steam Power or SD, so they can decide who is popular and who not. Of course this could make it really like a lottery...
Yes, I have done plenty of research on this, and likely to still do more. This structure is certainly slighted to the top 100 users. Who are in turn the owners and developers. So they are making $$ for all the work they have put into building this thing. I get that. The pay to post cat is already out of the bag, and its not going back in. Reddit knows it and developers are now looking at trying similar platforms. For Steemit to remain the leader, it soon will have to level out to keep its content providers. Competition is well under way. So my thought is dont give up on Steemit just yet.