Whales, Dolphins and Minnows: Why Each User is Important and Has a Role to Play In the Steemit Ecosystem

Recently there seems to be a lot of misguided hate towards whales who are sending posts past the hundred dollar range with a single upvote. There have been endless posts claiming vote rigging, content rigging or just a plain lack of whales caring about good content curation. Im sure in a few cases these happen to be true, however if you look deeper, many of the big whales are not posting content , but rather upvoting content based on other user’s votes.

If we look at the photo above at user @berniesanders we can obviously see that the vast majority of his activity is from upvoting other user’s content. Not only is he upvoting other user’s content, but he is upvoting it long after these posts have already been made and long after they have had input from dolphins and minnows. THIS is the reality of the situation when it comes to a whale’s curation method, they are waiting for posts to be noticed by dolphins and minnows before they upvote. The steemit ecosystem is showing signs that it is working in a bottom up fashion, which gives every user an important role.

Each class is looking for signals to see what content seems to be the most liked and deserving of an upvote. The whales look at what the dolphins voted on and the dolphins look at what the minnows vote on in order to make a decision. Minnows are at the bottom of the list in terms of wealth, but possibly have the most amount of pull when it comes to finding the content that will reach the front page or go viral. Sure we will get some bad content to the front page, but doesn’t that happen on Reddit and Facebook as well? How many times have you seen simple memes or posts on the front page of Reddit with thousands of upvotes? How many times have you seem the same trending video on Facebook that has been around for 1000 years? The whales are only as good as the signals they are getting from the dolphins and minnows, so if the content they are voting to $10 or $15 is bad, expect bad content on the front page. Don’t vote because it will make you money, vote because it signals good articles. If they are legitimately good you will make money if they go to the front page.

If you desire good content on the front page don’t look for the whales, look around at the dolphins and minnows because they will be the ones that will grab the attention of the whales. Whales are getting 1000 messages a day from people, begging them to look at their content. It is simply impossible for them to look at it all and most of them have jobs outside of Steemit. This is their LESUIRE activity and most seem to not realize that.

The final point I wanted to make is that with whales upvoting content from new creators they are creating a whole new class of whales who in return will create a whole new class of dolphins. This will take a long time but eventually we will start to see that the wealth becomes spread amongst everyone. Especially when we get more interactive tags or something similar to subreddits, we will see people start to enrich the content and communities they most care about on this site. If your content isn’t being noticed now its not a time to give up. I don’t want to use the term trickle-down economics for obvious reasons, but within steeminomics I believe it works because you don’t give away money when you vote, in fact you make money. We are extremely early here and we still have a long way to go, but things will change and the developers are working endlessly on creating a fairer system that people can enjoy.

-Calaber24p