IMHO, SteemIt has a serious problem with its payout formula. If a post receives less than $0.02; the rewards for the post will be wiped away as dust.
Having the rewards wiped away from one or two posts is not a problem. It inspires people to write better posts.
Unfortunately, I keep coming across accounts with hundreds of posts where the author received a huge number of upvotes but no monetary reward for the effort.
The really sad thing is that a large number of these people simply stop using SteemIt.
I want to emphasize. The dust problem causes people to leave the platform. This is a user retention issue. My guess is that SteemIt has lost several thousand content creators because of the dust problem.
The standard delegation for SteemIt is 15 HP. The upvote calculator on SteemNow shows that the upvote value of an account with 15 SP (the standard delegation) is worth only $0.0002. It takes 100 upvotes from a plankton account to equal $0.02.
An account needs $500.00 in SP for their upvote to be worth $0.02.
Another way to say that is the the accounts the upvote a post must have over $500 for the account to get a payout.
I am a huge fan of the 
Since the number of users on SteemIt has dropped dramatically in the last few months. I think everyone on the platform should consider subscribing to the service.
Despite my admiration of Dusty, I am aware of the negative effects of bots.
So, I thought I would haul Dusty before a kangaroo court and present the case against Dusty.
This case applies to most of the bots on SteemIt.
Essentially Dusty works as follows: You give Dusty a pile of SBD. Dusty will use that SBD to drop an upvote on a post with STEEM DUST.
This is not Dusty's formula. I will use it for argument's sake.
Okay, let's say you had a post with 0.01 in dust. Dusty takes the SBD you gave him and drops a $0.02 on the post. You will now get your half a penny. This looks great for an individual perspective.
It is terrible from a system's perspective.
Dusty's services burns two pennies from the rewards pool to give a user a half cent in profit.
One upvote is not a problem, but hundreds of thousands of two penny votes add up . Lets say Dusty gave 100,000 upvotes. The robot would consume $2,000.00 of the rewards pool to save $500 in dust ... not to mention the cost of 100,000 extra transactions on the blockchain.
While I like and recommend
Quite frankly, I think that the real solution is to lower the dust cutoff.
The formula might be creative. For example it might give the dust if the post had 10 or more upvotes. It might deny the dust if the post has a self-vote.
If one is worried about the cost of processing dust on the platform; one really should consider raising the dust threshold for curation rewards. Currently the system gives out curation rewards over 0.001 STEEM.
0.001 STEEM is worth only $0.0002 USD.
The big issue is user retention. SteemIt will not lose users over lost curation rewards.
Steemit will continue to lose content creators over content rewards.
I've seen the following happening multiple times. People will invest hundreds of hours writing posts on SteemIt. They will wonder why crappy posts from whales get $50 in rewards while the post they slaved over got 20 upvotes and no rewards.
They then leave SteemIt and never come back.
Anyway, I will continue to recommend
