Wealth inequality on Steemit mirrors the real world

Not far into this grand experiment, some disturbing parallels with the real world have emerged. A few big winners rake in the Steem while everybody else subsists on scraps. And we at the bottom seem very divided as to why things have turned out this way.

Some say it's because there are aspects of how Steemit rewards contributors that are imbalanced and in need of improvement. Indeed, the upcoming reduction of the payout period seems to be an implicit concession that this is the case. Others however, probably in the hopes of being rewarded by whales for rationalizing the status quo, have suggested that inequality is due to superiority and inferiority of ability and attitude.

You may have seen a post which references the Dunning-Kruger effect. In it, the author proposes that people confused as to why their content isn't attracting upvotes are mentally inferior, but so much so that they do not realize it, as well as overestimating the quality of their own work.

This is a rationale many have seen before, but applied to race and income, or other measures of success. The argument goes that equality of opportunity is all that is necessary, and that if races are not equally represented in positions of business, government, education, medicine, etc. after that it is because of actual, biological racial inequality.

This argument is also often leveraged against affirmative action laws favoring women. In either case we are meant to believe that no hidden discriminatory attitudes exist despite repeated experiments with job applications bearing a variety of different names showing that it couldn't be further from the truth.

Dump money on somebody and it's amazing how quickly they conclude it is because they deserve it. Because of their hard work, their good attitude, their high intelligence or whatever else. Despite being surrounded by evidence that it mostly comes down to being in the right place at the right time, while other people who are just as intelligent and driven have worked just as hard...for a pile of crumbs.

The alternative is guilt. Nobody likes guilt, and the human brain has a remarkable capacity for rationalizing it away. Everybody bothered by the randomness of it all, by the pandering and the direction it will take this platform in is a "whinger". An entitled, greedy parasite. (That is often how outsiders appear until you're one of them.)

That reasoning isn't accepted out there, so why accept it in here? A variety of mechanisms which are now in place to redress income inequality owe their existence to widespread recognition that Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump or Paris Hilton luxuriating in wealth while scientists, teachers, mathematicians and others are on food stamps, some living out of their cars is an indictment of the system which produced such a lopsided result.

Likely, the worst will be assumed of my motives. Both by whales and by their growing legions of sycophants. You can say I want a handout, that I am entitled, hurling whatever you think will stick. What I want is reform of how contributions are rewarded on this platform. A way to increase the exposure of articles which didn't get any exposure the first time around, simply because there's a deluge of content on this site.

It should be possible, for instance, to repost old work which made $0.00 or anything less than a certain amount, until it reaches or exceeds that amount, after which it can no longer be reposted. Whales should also not have increased voting power as that only leads to them voting for posts which flatter whales and rationalize their wealth.

Little tweaks like this do not rob anybody of the opportunity to make big bucks with a hit article, but by recirculating content until it earns a reasonable amount, improves the average person's odds of making a useful amount of money from their hard work.