What worries me most about the way Steem's price is going down (currently at $0.67) is that people who were making very little money will now make nothing, driving more and more people to quit the platform.
Mainly because of the dust factor, any post making less than $0.025 in any one article will simply not get paid, so a lot of the new red fish who got just a few pennies will for the foreseeable future make nothing out of their posts, for example my vote value is now a little over 1 cent at 100%, so any post I upvote has to still get over 1 cent in votes to get paid a difficult proposition for newbies.
Getting paid nothing for your articles will just make people leave the platform because they will see that Steemit is worse than Facebook, at least Facebook doesn't promise you will make money for posting. A random exodus of Steemians will have as a consequence a further drop in prices (if the prices are not set artificially, which I now think might be the case) and the price will become a Catch-22, it goes down because less people use Steemit, and less people use Steemit because the price is going down.
I personally do not have that problem as I have a couple of votes that always get me over the dust threshold, but I know a lot of people do get slapped by this Steemit to dust rule.
I think it is time for the bigger guys around here to start upvoting the posts that get very little at least with a 5 cent post, I guess a bot can be created that searches for posts that have been up for say 30 minutes and have less than 3 cents. This would at least help the people who make nothing to get paid. I know pennies don't sound like much but there are probably people in some countries who can make good use of them.
As an after thought, I think if Steem's price does go down way more than where it is now, I will also fall into the category of those gathering only dust as even my bot votes will probably not be enough to lift my posts out of dusthood.