I've seen a lot of people being frustrated with the current state of things, myself included sometimes. So I wanted to sit down and explain things in an easy to understand way for new users. 

Uneven post rewards

 The problem a lot of people have right now is that posts are "unfairly" rewarded. This post gets 10,000 dollars, this one gets 2 cents.  And sometimes the quality of a post may seem far below or above the rating it has received. This is a result of the way the steempower is currently divided in the community. 

The vast majority of steempower, which is what decides how much a vote from a user is worth,  is concentrated in the hands of only a handful of users. These users are commonly called whales and they are generally made up of individuals who got into steem very very early, and thus bought or acquired a lot of steem, or those who have invested a lot of money into the system. Now, obviously the people who have been around the longest and those that have invested the most should have the most say over who is rewarded, but the problem comes from the fact that there is very much in the way of middle ground between the super wealthy and the new posters running around with less than 1 cent of influence. What this means is that ANY post that a whale upvotes is gonna vastly outpace posts they don't This is because there isn't enough of a "Middle class", otherwise known as dolphins, to pick up the slack with many moderate awards instead of one huge one.  This creates an environment where a handful of posts are super successful while the majority go essentially unrewarded.  

The good news

As the community grows and the whales continue to upvote things we're gonna see the emergence of a larger population of dolphins. Even without a concerted effort on the part of the admin or the whales themselves, there's a natural accumulation of wealth that begins to grow as whales give out upvotes. All those posts you see getting 10,000 dollars? Thats the birth of a new dolphin. Because that user can now vote on other things and their votes will be worth a lot more than us average minnows. They won't have the influence of a whale, but the days of posts getting 10 votes and  2 cents will be replaced by most good posts getting at least a couple dollars. There will still be posts that get massive amounts of money, but they won't be the only ones reaping rewards. 

The bad news 

If Steemit continues to grow rapidly, the influx of new users could mean that the growth of this dolphin population might not happen quickly enough to see a major improvement in the disparity between post rewards. After all, even if 100 dolphins are created, it won't really help if the page starts getting 20,000 posts.  As such, the growth of the user base could actually undermine the rewards that many of those users are hoping to receive. 

A possible solution

One of the things that has been brought up by several people, including whales themselves, is that we might be able to mitigate this problem somewhat if whales were allowed to choose how much they want their upvotes to be worth.  Why would that help? Well, look at it like this.  A whale has a big investment into steemit, an investment they want to protect. As such, they don't want to be handing out massive amount of money to every post, even posts they like.  So a handful of posts are chosen for their valuable upvotes, and the rest are sadly left alone.  And one of the major reasons for this is that they have no control over how much their votes are worth. When someone like berniesanders votes on a funny picture, that vote is worth 4-5 hundred dollars, which is a huge amount of money to just give away. So bernie doesn't vote very much to prevent the site from being flooded with thousands of dollars.  However, if he had the choice to vary his upvote power, it would mean that he could spread that otherwise massive vote around to lots of other posts. Instead of 500 dollars going to a single funny picture, he could give 5 dollars to 100 pictures. Or any combination, varying his rewards depending on how much he liked the post. 

This would effectively allow whales to act like dolphins, bridging the gap between extremely low post rewards and extremely high ones while the population of actual dolphins developed over time. 

The downside to this is that these "Scalable Whales" could actually prolong the creation of a large population of dolphins because, unlike the massive rewards that essentially create a dolphin in a single upvote, users would have to acquire many smaller rewards in order to reach the status of dolphin. However, this might actually be a better method, because it would require a user to consistently produce high quality material rather than just get lucky one time.  And that could result in a better community overall, where merit and hard work over time places a user at a higher level, instead of simply being lucky enough to be the one post that a whale upvoted today. 

The future of steemit

Steemit is going to the meown!

Regardless of whether or not this possible change is implemented the disparity between post rewards and the distribution of wealth/steempower among users is something that will not last forever. Eventually we're going to see things start to even out a bit and the average payment posts receive is going to go up.  Not only that but the value of steem continues to rise, even small rewards could become quite something in the future. Those 50 cents worth of steam power you got today could be worth 10 times that in the future. 

Don't be discouraged by what might seem, at a glace, an unfair system. Things are changing, the community is growing, and any steem power you have is becoming more valuable every day. For the moment just...