Power laws in Steemit

Ever since I joined, I’ve wondered what kind of payout distribution would have a novel platform like Steemit. So this morning I resolved to crack this problem. I don't know much about coding or databases, so I did it old style. I chose the tag “writing” which I think should be fairly representative of the whole platform and grouped every post by hand, copied it into Excel and made some cool graphs.

Payout $	Posts
0-1	387
1-5	73
5-10	34
10-30	25
30-50	19
>50	11

Total: 549

Payout $	% of total
0-1	70,49
1-5	13,3
5-10	6,19
10-30	4,55
30-50	3,46
>50	2

Total: 549

So, at the end, no big surprises: the payouts follow a Pareto distribution, somehow expected, with 84% of the post earning $5 or less, just 10% of them breaking the $10 barrier. This becomes even clearer calculating the percentage of the total payout that each group accumulates. So supposing an average of 0.5 2.5 7.5 20 40 and 100 for each group, the top-10% of the post (the top-3 groups) get approximately 78% of the total payout.

Payout $	% of total payout
0-1	6,47
1-5	6,1
5-10	8,53
10-30	16,72
30-50	25,41
>50	36,78

So why a lot of users put so much effort for so little reward? Well, I think the answer varies from person to person: for some it may be the cool feeling of belonging to something new and disruptive, for others it may be the quality of the interactions, and for others the hope of climbing up to the top of the ladder. This last one reminds me of a cool book I read a few years ago: Gang leader for a day: a rogue sociologist takes to the streets.

Why people work that hard in winners-take-it-all economies? For the lure of the big prize, the small chance of being one of the “chosen’s one”. I have no hopes of reaching the top, but being human behavior one of my passions I'm really excited about this massive human experiment!!