What Steemit is – And What it Should be.

Dear friends and Steem Family!

So, first of all, I need to clarify, I am enjoying steemit as a social media platform and I for sure am an advocate of its ideas and goals. I even invested money in steem to be able to make a difference when voting for content. I am not one of the people crying about how unfair the system is because they don’t get rich in an instant. I am not.

HOWEVER

However, I do have some huge issues with what steemit has become and how it works right now. The beauty of this platform is that criticism and new ideas might actually change something in the future. I know, the odds are against me, but I want to share my points with the community anyways. Since only constructive criticism is useful, I will try to propose an idea on how to deal with steemit’s biggest problem as well.

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DECENTRALIZED?

One of the most important aspects of the blockchain is the fact that it is decentralized. While I am not sure about how steem is mined, and therefore don’t feel entitled to an opinion about the actual coin’s decentralization (only 20 miners/witnesses?), I do want to share my thoughts on steemit as a platform in that regard.

My main argument is that the voting power is way too concentrated on certain accounts. While I don’t have the exact numbers, I would guess that over 90% of the total steem power is shared by 1% of the richest accounts.

Now, I could start complaining about how unfair etc. the system is, but again, that’s not my point. People who invested in an early stage took a risk and became rich, it’s called capitalism and it’s fine with me.

BUT

Because the steem power is so concentrated on a small number of accounts, steemit has become a place, where the whales and dolphins (most of them) upvote content they see and produce incredibly high payouts. That content comes from other big accounts most of the time. It is upvoted not because of its quality but because the dolphins know and help each other and have been around for a long time. My point is, the quality of a post and its payout have little to do with its payout.

I see bullshit content, nonsense posts and (my own genre) incredibly bad photography get huge payouts all the time. People give each other compliments for stuff that is so bad, it makes me feel like deleting the entire internet. I would love to give you guys some examples now, but that wouldn't be a nice thing to do and I believe most of you have seen that kind of posts and know what I am talking about.

People can publish the worst posts, they still get compliments and engagement if they have a lot of steem power in their wallet. It often disgusts me.

SOLUTION?!

What I want to propose – I know it’s not going to happen for obvious reasons, but think about it anyways – is a cap on the voting power, a maximum so to speak. Whales can keep their huge wallets and profit from the fact that they invested early enough of course, but at the same time, the power of an upvote should be capped. It just has nothing to do with decentralization if one person’s vote is worth 50 SBD and most people’s honest upvotes are worth 0.01. It simply doesn’t.

For example, I would say, an upvote cannot be worth more than 5 SBD. Since the total amount of created value per day should stay the same, the votes of small accounts would become worth more. In other words, the amount of SBD produced per day would remain steady, the distribution amongst accounts however, would become more even.

That way, steemit would be a lot more decentralized again. A posts quality and the number of its readers would be more important again.

So far – as hard it is to admit – steemit does (and that’s simply a fact) have a lot of parallels with pyramid schemes…

Let me know what you think and resteem this post if you wanna help spread the idea…

Till then,
keep wandering and wondering,

Love,

mr.wonderlust