RE: Are we only here to feed the narcissists?
That is correct @smooth, TDV's post didn't take all the money. The point was that if you hit your hard worked post in a day where a couple celebrities do theirs (or some new app comes on/gets updated), there are way less chances to get yours noticed. I'm not complaining. Used to when I was starting up on Steemit but not anymore. Perseverance is my motto now. Keep at it and you'll get noticed. Contribute (on steemit with posts, comments, curation, on steemit.chat helping people), grow an audience, and then you'll get noticed easier once you build your rep.
In this post @steve-walschot was bringing to discussion celebrities that do repetitive, similar posts, grabbing the attention on Steemit over the same idea over and over. I agree that we need to build our audience, but we can be easily shadowed by others who have a natural big audience. Yup, 73% was left. For 49.999 Steemians :)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that I'm not getting rewards, that is not why I, and many other are on Steemit for as their main goal.
PS. Maybe I'm mistaking but the total amount of steem awarded in a day is 28,800 STEEM (?) which is about $ 56k at the current price. Not that it makes a big difference in what you said.
The reward pool earns 2 STEEM per block, so that is 57 600 STEEM/day. A maximum of 25% of that goes to voters, but that is reduced in practice because authors vote for themselves (by default in the UI) and by the penalty for voting within the first 30 minutes. This might be slightly less than $100K now with the reduced STEEM price (though it was higher when TDV made his first post), but still reasonably close.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying it.