About 4 months ago, I made a post comparing reward distribution on Steemit and its younger brother, Golos. You can read that post <a href="https://steemit.com/steemit/@svamiva/from-golos-with-love">here.</a> 

Recently I thought that it might be interesting to check out if there had been any changes since then.

When it comes to Golos, there haven't been any revolutionary changes. Golos token price, after testing its bottom, returned back to its February level, so the reward pool is almost the same now as it was then. However, there aren't any top-1 posts collecting 10+% of total reward pool as it used to be in February; now, there's just 3-4% of TRP being paid out to top-1 posts, which corresponds with what we have here on Steemit. With the number of daily posts doubling since February, average payouts on Golos had been bigger than on Steemit, but now it's slightly less, just about $4.50.

As for Steemit, as we all know, there have been some changes indeed since February.
With Steem's price jumping from below $0.20 to over $2, the total daily reward pool went from about $7000 to ~$90,000.
It's no surprise that the daily number of posts also increased tenfold over this time, from 1300 to 13,000. This has left the average payout per post almost the same; it's about $6.50 at the moment.

Apart from many other changes on Steemit, there's the most recent - the so-called *Equality* Hardfork, which increased vote weight for accounts having less SP, and was meant to decrease the influence of *Whales* on payouts.

At first thought, the hardfork should be making the reward distribution more even. The fact is it though that it's simply not happening.


By the time I made my February survey, 70 top-posts collected 50% of the total reward pool, leaving the other half for the 1230 remaining posts.

Now, what do you think? With the number of posts increasing tenfold, what is the number of posts collecting 50% of the TRP? Do you expect it to be around 700 posts instead of 70 before?

Well, no, nothing like that.

Nowadays 50% of the TRP is going to ***the same magic number of 70*** posts, leaving 12900+ posts to struggle for the other half of the TRP.

That makes me think that concerns about people had for the post-HF19 landscape, where people would begin voting for their own posts and comments in greater numbers, simply didn't materialize. If that had been the case, we would have seen the center of gravity for Steemit rewards moving towards an "average" Steemian, but this hasn't happened.
Instead, it looks like "old Steemians" are sticking to their limited list of favorite authors, and the Long Tail of new Steemians is just getting peanuts.

It would be interesting to see the future dynamics of reward distribution. For now, though, it looks like the gap between top performers and newbies is just getting bigger, despite this newly-introduced *equality*.

http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1498500944.png