These changes make perfect sense. Steem's greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness is that is has an extraordinary short Time-to-Value for content creators. The rewards come from the common pool and the value of the pool comes from investors who invest in the entire ecosystem when they buy into the token. Why is this a great strength? Because it makes Steem very, very lucrative for content creators because they can get rewarded quite easily and quickly particularly if they're early adopters. Why is this a weakness? Because it is very easy for stakeholders to become lazy and upvote without considering the value of what is being upvoted very carefully.

Even at the current low price, Steem pays better and more quickly to most content creators after they start using the platform than any other platform. A Steem user who puts out quality content can get paid rather well long before his/her content can draw attention and generate value that way and capture it by generating advertising revenue. This is why it is absolutely necessary for stakeholders to be more discerning and concentrate rewards on behaviors that bring traffic to the platform allowing that traffic to be monetized non-speculatively.

The creators of Steem must have imagined that the opportunity to earn massive rewards quickly would have content creators climbing on top of each other to sign up and create great content to compete for the rewards. Indeed, the rewards were incredible in the summer of 2016 when the legendary ten thousand dollar make-up tutorial was posted. Such a platform should've gone viral and become the most popular content delivery platform of all times in short order. But that didn't happen. A second opportunity was given late 2017/early 2018 when the cryptocurrency bull market peaked. While a lot of content creators came on board, that number should've been orders of magnitude larger. I think what went wrong was that onboarding was way too difficult. Paradoxically, Steem was perhaps even too good to be true. Some people I tried to onboard in the summer of 2017 had real trouble with the concept of where all the money came from since there were no ads. They took it for a scam while in reality Steem was always just a new form of venture capitalism - and an exceptionally user/content creator friendly version at that.

Because the pool is over an order of magnitude less valuable now than it was during the last peak, stakeholders must be much more careful about how it is allocated. Requiring content creators to create engaging content capable of reaching the a large number of people is a must. Also, actually engaging the followers is important, too, because such engagement directly increases key metrics like time spent on site and more intangible ones like the impact on the users.