I don't think the long term prospects of Devcoin are very bright. The more people who write, the less pie there is for writers? That means it's a zero sum game. Why are people actually trying to attract more writers if the case is that quality will go down and so will the pay? It doesn't seem to be good for Devcoin either.
Long term the quality of articles of Devcoin will begin to reflect what writers are paid to write them.
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You may end up being correct. This is truly a unique experiment for a business plan. On the surface it's almost ideal but the big question is: can it be sustained and will quality improve or worsen as time goes on and shares shrink.
MarkM, made a good point that people won't rush out to just write anything cause the shares are large. At the same time you're correct too, one would expect quality to worsen as talented or educated people rather spend their time where they can maximize their earnings potential.
It remains to be seen. I'm excited to see what happens.
My opinion is, if you reduce the pay so that it's no longer worth it to truly dig deep to write something great then less great works will be created. Rewarding writers only per word is too limited. Why not allow a rating system so that highly rated works get bonus shares? Also why are works essentially set per round? Over time when the shares shrink smaller and smaller they claim a lot of people just will stop writing as if everyone is of the same class as them or has the same amount of money? The people who need money the most will write whether the shares are $10 or $500 and I think globally those people vastly outnumber those of privilege who can write as they feel like it.
I do think quality will go down but it doesn't have to. The only change necessary to keep the quality writers is to change the system so that quality is rewarded. This can be accomplished by allowing readers to link a vote to an email address and then rate each article they read. The way to allow this is to link it either by verified email, or by Bitcointalk username and let people vote and maybe even pay them in Devcoins to review/vote.
Most revenue-sharing sites reward per visitor, not per upvote or per word (the per word thing is a hangover from print journalism).
Upvotes can be manipulated (remember how the old Digg had cliques who upvotes each other's stuff to get to the home page).
The only reliable measure of whether a piece is any good is
visitors - are people reading it, is Google featuring it in their search engine, are people sharing it on reddit? If you use an analytics package like Google analytics, which filters out all the bot hits and only counts the views from a browser, you can get a pretty reliable idea of which articles are popular.