There's only so much hash you can throw at certain small coins before it becomes unprofitable because you drive up the difficulty agaisnt yourself.
The more time people spend with researching coins, the more they can get and small miners tend to do more of that than big farms. The latter group usually prefers plug and play mining on some big multipool or just mining one big coin because it's simple.
I'm out of the loop recently so to me LBRY is the most profitable most of the time but there are always coins ahead of the curve in terms of profitability but whenever it's mentioned here, it's dead. Not because of the few people commenting here start to mine them but because a shitton of people reads these threads without even commenting and sharing miners/tips/etc with others on different platforms.
I proposed a private circle of miners sharing mining and trading tips (but NOT private miners) long ago but it didn't stick.
Yup. It's not just bigger miners don't want to do it, just you can't mine them without the coin difficulty getting completely wrecked. The exchanges don't have enough volume to support it either.
Small coins means small difficulty and small volume.
It's a shame. This is very much a zero sum game. I do enjoy working with others, but when it comes to mining it's pretty much every man for himself. The moment you start giving other people information, unless you're getting paid for it, it's getting used against you because they mine whatever you're mining and essentially take a piece of your profits.
I would actually be willing to pay people for information on small, trending, rising star sort of coins as I don't have the time to do it myself. That's how important intel is to people who mine. I don't know exactly how I could do it, but I've often regarded that as a job in and of itself.
I'm still willing to pay for good miners, unfortunately, that seems to be something almost no one is willing to do. SP was one of the few Nvidia devs and he basically retired. I've mentioned this before, but I definitely believe that a marketplace for miners or a coop fee based miner would also be good.
Once again, popular picks right now if you're developing. A dual miner for Ethereum, improvements on Epsylons LBRY miner, Nvidia SIA coin improvements (they're pretty bad), and a STEEM GPU miner.