it feels like every new miner just gets pointed towards one of the 3 largest pools

and newbies seem more concerned with compiling out the miner donation fee than looking for lower fee pools!

hell of a lot of miners have no clue what they're doing and just blindly use a "big" pool thiking it will get them the most profit.

it's an uphill battle trying to educate.

if/when there are more like 10 "big" pools evened out, this doesn't matter too much.

if the bigger pools upped their fees, it would probably help a bit so the newer/smaller pools can compete on fees at least.

what worries me more is if one of the big 3 has some outage/hack, all the miners they have will just jump to the other 2 big pools, which would make things worse.

community information is also limited on the smaller pools. When someone comes to #monero-pools with an issue on some smaller pool it isn't at all clear what the issue is, who to direct them to... The big 2 at least have a presence there ...

(and select smaller ones of course, but path of least resistance leads to the big pools)