Well, what you saw in the early days was in my view something that should've never happened. Ninja-mining is a word that is sometimes used. Giving out tremendous amounts of Steem to a few users resulting in most of the Steem value being in the hands of a very few. There is just a finite amount of Steem distributed on a daily bases, not sure ho much, but at some point it was something like 40k US$ worth of Steem. When you expect 100$ on a post, you'll take a large percentage of the total Steem distributed that day, so how sustainable is this. For any social network to become sucessfull, it needs a lot of users and content and somehow the new Steem minted every day needs to be distributed in a way it also gets to the new(er) users as well as to more of them. All of that means much much less $ on a post or comment than what you've seen in the early days. That said: Steem was and is introduced to bring power to a few, more or less make it a centralised decentralised social network. Same thing now is happening with EOS, where former CTP of Steemit INC moved to. Some big whales are colluding against the system.