In Steemit we have what is known as the "casino effect". This describes the fact that posting rewards are variable: Some times bloggers may get a very small reward while other times they may hit the "jackpot" with some pretty high reward.
This variance[1] also extends to the quality of content: An author will write several posts and when the rewards are finalized the author may be very surprised to find out that his better articles didn't get more rewards.
Similarities with Commerce
Some will complain that this is simply evidence that the system is problematic but ...have they ever considered the amazing similarities with commerce in the real economy?
If you've ever owned a store you may have noticed that there are days where selling is very slow and other days when selling is going very well. Some times selling can be so bad where the entire day is a bust - with no money generated.
This variance can extend to larger time periods - like having a week or a month which has been extraordinarily good, or atrociously bad.
Can you spot the parallels with Steemit?
Whose fault is it that a shop does good or bad in different days, different weeks, or different months? The "whale shoppers" who are casting their "buying votes" in a bad way?
On top of that, in the shop scenario, there is also product variance: Products that can be considered "junk" may be selling like crazy, while products that one would assume would sell a lot, in reality don't generate enough revenue.
Paradoxical situations may emerge where a store is sitting on an expensive stock that should be high-performing, while making its daily revenue on stock that seemed stuck and forgotten...
Again, do you see the parallels with Steemit - where "bad posts" can be generating more money than "good posts"? Is it "the whales" fault that this is happening in actual real-life stores?
The Bottom Line matters
In the end of the day, stores thrive or go bust based on the "bottom line" result over a long time, and over the sale of thousands of items. The daily affairs are not that significant in the larger scheme of things - although they can and do create bursts of happiness or disappointment to the shop owner - just like a Steemit poster may feel after getting a high or a low reward.
Store owners, while impressed by the variance of dry periods or product selling anomalies, quickly learn to rationalize the situation and ignore this variance by focusing on long-term revenue and costs. They won't close their shop based on a dry day, week or month.
In the context of Steemit, one could adopt the bottom-line approach of the merchant and say: "I don't care if 40 of my posts made just 10$ while another 10 posts made 1200$. The bottom line is that over two months I wrote 50 posts, got 1210$, so that's an average of 20$ per day and 24$ per post".
The "merchant approach" of dealing with the bottom-line result, is an efficient and time-proven method that allows one to better handle the emotional roller-coaster that daily variance can create. It can become the blogger's biggest intellectual ally in dealing with emotional irrationality.
[1] In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its mean, and it informally measures how far a set of (random) numbers are spread out from their mean. -Wikipedia