There are two major kinds of miners (heh major miners) that mine on public pools - the first is those that have full control over their hashrate - even if they have only one piece of hardware or an entire farm of their own. These people make choices on their own based on whatever information they can get their hands on and how they interpret it regarding what pools are out there. These are the miners you often see posting here on the forum and while relatively anonymous do have a public face. They're the ones that determine how much hashrate goes to each pool and can drastically change the balance of hashrate between the pools... but it's only a SMALL proportion of the network hashrate in reality. These are the only ones we can possibly attract to this pool. The other type of miner are the large entities that set up farms and have set up deals with the pools they run on and are often even a subsidiary company or the same company as that running the pool - we can't possibly attract them to this pool. Unfortunately I estimate the "public swaying miners" are less than 5% of the network hashrate. Of those, swaying miners are often driven to the bone for making profits and for whatever reason run so tight that they want a "regular income" and as little risk as possible - a small pool cannot provide either of those; it comes with much more risk (and potentially much more gain) but no regular income. These miners probably constitute 95% of the swaying miner hashrate, leaving only a tiny proportion of the network that can "afford" to mine on a smaller pool. This means that a big pool is always guaranteed to attract some miners from the swaying miners, but a small pool has only a minuscule proportion of the network hashrate it can attract.

Until a smaller pool becomes a bigger pool, it cannot become a bigger pool. That's not a typo; it's a cyclical problem. I'm saying it's impossible for a small pool in the current climate to ever get big again unless it has deals with big miners. If this pool was 1EH now, all the new swaying miners will likely make it their first choice since it meets the criteria of regular income and low risk and has the lowest fee anywhere, but even then would never be more than 5% of the network. Slush is unique at meeting this criteria because it's been around as the first pool and still manages to get a big hashrate from the swaying miners, but it's still only 3% of the network hashrate. The rest of the pools aren't really there for you public miners; they have a public face but they have motherfucking huge miners that will only ever mine there, keeping their hashrate high and centralising hashrate.