Steemit Economics 101: What is holding your posts down?

^{This posting is brought to you as an editorial by the High Priest of the Church of Piglet. We care so you don't have to; we speak when you wouldn't dare to. Donate generously.}

You may wonder why your postings aren't doing all that great. One of the reasons could be your content is mediocre, or even crap, and that probably explains a fair bit, but there are other mechanisms at work as well. Some of them are just Steemit economics at work.

It's a free-for-all market here, with plenty of room for scheming, vote-for-voting, and reward pool rape, which in practice means that your rewards will mainly depend on the size of your wallet, your ability to buy votes, the circle jerks and in-crowds you are part of, how little you care about the long-term health of the community as opposed to your own short-term interests, and how popular you are as measured by the size of your sycophant following who are keeping a keen eye on the size of your wallet. Exceptions are few and far between (but do exist).

This is why the trending page looks like it does.

There's also a lot of freedom here, so you may criticise all you want, I know I do, but there's no point; this is just Steemit working as intended, and most whales and witnesses have given up caring about such details a long time ago. If you want big rewards, join the schemers; you surely can't beat them anymore, what with the current wealth distribution and where it is trending towards, so buy in or suck up.

If you don't want to try and join them, the best you can do is mute them, as flagging will provoke retaliation only the very rich can afford to ignore. There probably is a level of muting that makes the Trending Page look palatable again in your feed, and you could then just post, communicate, and generally enjoy your stay here, which is probably the right attitude anyway.

These economic processes normally aren't explicit, but I caught one of the mechanisms at work on one of my walks in the forest; here's a very rare photo of Adam Smith's invisible hand keeping a post down:

^{Olympus Stylus 1s, 85mm, ISO200, f5.6, 1/100s}

Normally you wouldn't see this happening, but this early in the season, even the invisible hand was cold enough to require a glove.

So now you know. Carry on.