A new trend started to burn STEEM (if you care about it)... I won't embark on this trend myself (you'll see why), but I'm not against it either.
After I first joined Steem and started to make little purchases, I thought to myself: Hmm, this inflation will erode in time my Steem investment.
That's not the same really. To the world outside Steem, and to me at that point, inflation meant:
Source: Investopedia
To Steem, inflation is represented by the newly printed STEEM. And of those, all of us get a cut, higher or smaller, depending on our contributions. And the inflation rate is continuously dropping, by around 0.5% per year. Currently I think it is around 8.5% per year and it will continue to drop until it reaches the value of 0.95% per year, in about 20.5 years since Hardfork 16 took place (November 2016), when inflation rate was drastically reduced.
It is not unlikely that a hard fork will change the inflation rate (most likely reduce it further or make it drop quicker), if that is deemed necessary in the future.
An investor with an inflation aversion will not choose STEEM in the first place. He or she will go to bitcoin or similar, with a fixed amount of coins ever in existence.
When STEEM matures, its inflation will be small enough to be insignificant to almost anyone. But one would have a long term perspective to see that.
Burning post rewards is made very easy lately, through interfaces like Steempeak, and recently Steemit.com too.
Burning STEEM is the same as sending them the the 
Now, why the trend of burning STEEM and not changing the inflation rate directly through a hard fork, if we are unhappy with it?
I believe they can be complementary, and one doesn't have to be unhappy with the inflation rate to do a burn of STEEM.
Without inflation, there are no witness rewards, no reward pool, no Steem Proposal System recurrent funding. Pretty difficult to imagine Steem work without them at this point. So lowering inflation (which already happens over time), means less STEEM printed and distributed to each of those categories.
Burns can be done with STEEM you already have if you send it to
While I've seen different categories of people burning post rewards, for me it doesn't make sense for small-ish accounts, and that's why I'm not doing it. I realize that may seem selfish, but there are reasons why small accounts should be oriented on growing their SP. Here's a serious one in my book: not being able to make the dust threshold if you vote on comments.