Lottery-Formula Is Used For Payout-Structure On Steemit
According to the steemit-whitepaper, page 20 (https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf) out of a million of "items", which means blog posts or users, 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.
This is done by applying Zipf's law, which is also used for casinos and lotteries, as is openly stated in the whitepaper (page 20).
So it is indeed very hard to make serious money here. You need to belong to the top 1% of the most popular bloggers. But at least whereas in the lottery luck decides, here it is popularity.
However 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.