I definitely agree that new users should not anticipate getting rich quickly from a few posts on Steemit, but in a way it can be seen as free money. Are you writing posts that you would write regardless of if you were getting paid or not? If yes, then I would argue that this is "free" money for the user making the post.

I think a lot of times, people try to over complicate things to show that they have value when in reality, 90% of new users don't really care about witnesses and nodes and all that infrastructure. Hell, I don't really care about understanding how the whole thing works and I've been here since the beginning. This is not meant as a criticism to you by any means because I truly do value your post and think it is very helpful to new users, I just think we should all remember that there are many different types of users that are attracted to Steemit and we shouldn't knock those who are here for different reasons than ourselves.