RE: Why There Is No Such Thing As "Draining The Reward Pool"
My perception was that people complaining are doing it from a scarcity mindset: "If some guy takes out $200/day there won't be much left for us". This obviously means they don't really know from where the money comes.
The validity of the complaint stands true only when you look from a percentage perspective. "It's unfair that someone takes 10% of the reward pool". And as you said, even that is not valid, since it's a free market.
But in absolute terms, in fiat money, the reward pool "size" can be increased by increasing the value of Steem. I think that's where we should focus.
If, for instance, Steem trades at $1, there will be a $46,000 worth of rewards pool. Even with 10,000 blog posts / day (from 1,500 where we are now) this should guarantee an average payout of $4.6/article (I know average doesn't work here, it's just theoretical). There are content factories which are charging $5/article as we speak, so this would be aligned with the market place (by the way, in absolute terms we are at the same level, slightly above, with $4.8/article at the current price and community size).
But from that moment, the "attention economy" driven by a much higher number of participants at the game should kick in and things could spiral up, in a positive way.
this will happen when the value of steem increases.
Which will happen (as you correctly point out) when good content attracts new users and investors.
Which will happen when people are encouraged to publish good content based on their perception that it is likely to b e rewarded.
Yes, and projects like curie (using that as an example because of @liberost commenting above) will drain 6x as much. Thats the thing..., the "drain" is not a fixed dollar value, its a percent based on the support of their voter base. If SV, curie, TIL, etc etc take 50%=3550 of a 7100 reward pool, that doesnt mean theyll take 3550 out of a 46000 reward pool, it means theyll take 23000 out of a 46000 reward pool,
When steem was at $4, We decided to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to authors like rolandp guerrint, stellabelle, their cohort, and nothing or practically nothing to out other writers. The result: they all percieved their content was not valued, and they left. this:
is precisely what didnt happen. And precisely the reason, imo, that we lost most of hte people interested in the platform at the time.