The New Nobility

Much has been said about the disproportionate voting power of certain Steemit users known as "whales".  A handful of people have millions of STEEM/SP and a single vote from such a person can result in a larger payout  than hundreds of minnow.

No matter how you feel about this there does appear to be an inherent inequality present here.  Crypto is supposed to be about escaping the inequalities that we see in the regular world of corrupt governments who seem to serve the purposes of the banks and corporations more than the people.

Sadly no matter how hard people try to change this in the crypto world it seems that the same inequalities tend to spill over into it.  What we end up having is a new emerging nobility with the ability to individually guarantee the success (through voting) of a few individuals and the failure of the many who may be equally worthy (through the lack of whale votes).

Many of us have seen very worth posts that are well written, composed, formatted, cover important topics and have gotten nowhere despite having many upvotes - the problem being that no matter how many upvotes a post has if they are from minnows then they will make at best a few dollars (often even less than a dollar).  

This is not enough to propel them to the top of the "Trending" list as this seems to be based on dollars earned.It is even more galling when it has become apparent that at least one whale is using a voting bot that automatically up-votes certain posters. 

More alarmingly this bot may have been upvoting posts from a well known poster who is simply reposting other people's photography (without their permission) and earning large sums of money as a result of what many would consider theft.

The Price of Patronage

Now I know that this stance will not get popular support.  The whales will ignore it because it doesn't suit them.  There is already evidence of a kind of "echo chamber" mentality.  The whales only hear what the want to hear because most people do not want to lose favour with them. 

People will do anything to get their patronage - indeed my suggestion of this to the aforementioned whale resulted in me being accused of "hostility" - which couldn't be further from the truth.

The opinions of whales also get more up-votes. 

This is for a couple of reasons - firstly due to their voting power their self votes on posted content will raise them to the top of the Steemit tree instantly.  Secondly there are people trying to gain their favour in the hope that an up-vote will get noticed and finally there is also the almost certainty of a good curation payout (particularly if another whale up-votes on a fellow whale’s post after you).

We can’t really be surprised if people try to maximise their chances in this way - indeed I have personally succumbed to the temptation to do it myself in the hope of a good curation reward.  People will make use of the system that is in place and this includes taking advantage of it.

Ultimately though this kind of thing does not benefit Steemit as a whole.  It only serves to make the Whales even more powerful which weakens the relative position of the minnows.  The rich nobility get richer and very little changes for the poor “peasants” in the system.It is in the best interests of all of us, not just the minnows to deal with these kind of issues because they affect the long time viability of the whole STEEM/STEEMIT platform. 

If it fails then the whales stand to lose just as much if not more than the rest of us. Whether they will listen or not is another matter.  

It is well known that power is intoxicating and can make people feel like they are invincible.  One doesn’t need to look too far in business or politics or any other human endeavour to see examples of this.

The whales will continue to have disproportionate power and the effect will continue to be amplified due to the minnows being fearful of speaking out and trying to gain favour from those in power. In some ways this is even worse than the current situation in regular life - it is indeed more similar to a medieval kingdom.

Dealing with the Inequality

There are no “perfect” solutions to the situation we find ourselves in.  One way is to simply wait long enough for the wealth to get redistributed with things staying as they are.  The problem is that this will take an immense length of time (I’m sure someone who is mathematically skilled can come up with an estimate) - given the way that things move in the cryptoshere it will almost certainly take too long.  Here are a handful of suggestions that I can think of please add your own in the comments section:

Delegated Voting

The idea with this is simple.  

Say you are a whale and you don’t have time to curate as much content as you would like yourself, what can you do?  Well you could use a bot to do it but as previously discussed that is not ideal and not really in the spirit of voting things up on merit. 

What if you could pass on your voting power to somebody else who DID have the time to vote properly.  You could decide how long for - could be a day or could be a year.  

You could do it by choosing someone whose curation you respect or it could even be done randomly. 

Either way it would lead to a greater spread of voting power and a more diverse choice of posts that get rewarded.

Cap or Restrict Self Upvotes

As previously discussed an upvote from a whale with a lot of SP will immediately propel their post to the top of the Steemit tree.  

A cap on the maximum amount of SD a self up-vote creates (e.g. $1) would help to combat this and make the system fairer.  

This would also help to partially reduce (but not eliminate) the curation incentive for voting on whale posts.

Cap the Maximum Voting Power for Individual Accounts

This is almost a combination of the prior two suggestions.  This would restrict how much of an impact a single person could have on votes.  

The risk would be that it might encourage people to make multiple accounts to game the system.

Anonymise Posts for the first few hours

I have seen this suggested in some places by other posters and initially it seems like a good idea.  

This might help to reduce the issue of trying to gain favour through up-voting whales.  

It could also produce some problems of its own though.  For example if you have a particular writer you like to follow it would make it almost impossible to filter out and find their work.

Reorganise Posts to Rank them According to Number of Votes NOT Steem Dollars

I believe that this would be a fairer way to organise the default "Trending" category on Steemit.  Posts with the most total votes would rise to the top, irrespective of their dollar value.  

Note I believe this is different from the "Active" category which looks at the last active posts.  

There could still be a category to show posts according to their Steem Dollar values but this could be called something else and in my opinion should not be the default view.

Conclusions

Whilst the issues we have discussed may seem disheartening, I am sure we as a community can deal with them.  

As I have stated before the whole idea of Steemit is very clever and very refreshing.  By allowing people to earn money from their posts people are rewarded rather than the platform itself (which is how it seems with conventional social media). 

If done right this could be the biggest thing since Facebook. The cryptocurrency community as a whole is composed of some of the smartest people I know and there is no such thing as an insurmountable problem.

I do hope people (including the whales) take notice.  They stand to lose just as much, if not more, than the rest of us.

Please feel free to add your own thoughts below and let me know what you think can be done to deal with the issues I have discussed.

(All images are public domain and linked from Wikepedia except final image of "No negativity sign" which is Creative Commons By Newthoughtdocumentary - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21864488)

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(What does #craigrant tag mean? Check out more here: https://steemit.com/craigrant/@craig-grant/heaven-have-fun-reap-the-benefits-of-your-posts-being-seen-by-a-community-of-bloggers-who-support-each-other)