Many seem to be excited about the new update and what it means. It is great to see this new platform evolve, but has it come at the cost of the incentive to write articles for Steemit? You be the judge.
So up until just the other day I've been able to consistently trend posts pulling in around 200 steam dollars give or take. I've found that you seem to get the highest rewards from obtaining upvotes from people who do not already follow you ie, creating organic upvotes that results from content finding its way to new people. Now I find that when my posts hit 20-40 likes, nothing happens. I didn't assume that I was going to maintain the same payout as I grew with followers due to the fact that having a good following alone is not good enough and as mentioned. I was of the idea that to garner high rewards you need to get your content in front of new people that they enjoy. But now my rewards have been reduced by a factor of 10.
As you can see what was once a profitable endeavor has now become a waste of my time. I don't expect every post to bring me x dollars nor do I expect every post to be a winner. What I do expect is to be able to figure out how the system works even if roughly to be able to create content according to the demands of those in the community who do consume the content at a consistent rate. If one has a decent follower base, and the willingness not to just create content for an echo chamber but the interest in making that content attractive to new people that should translate to rewards. Why? Because information is being disseminated across ideological barriers to the benefit of the community incentivizing content producers to make their content attractive to new people.
Now there is an option where you can trade Steem dollars to promote you articles. Do I have anything against promoting content? Certainly not. In fact I welcome the idea. But have the rewards systems been nerfed to incentivize you to promote your articles in the face of reduced rewards? I'm not sure. But here is what I do know. I was able to consistently trend articles and now I'm consistently failing no matter how good or bad the content I put out there is and it isn't because people have stopped upvoting articles.