RE: Updated thoughts on 'the whale experiment'
I agree with all three of your comments. I've said the same thing. They just don't care. Whale votes are bad and you apparently just need to accept that.
They keep saying that the distribution is "unfair," but I don't see them volunteering to distribute their own whale stake. They just want others to comply with their demands.
The only way that the "unfairness" can actually be resolved (and I don't even see this as practical or even "good") is for all of the whales to redistribute their own stake to smaller users. Anything short of that accomplishes pretty much nothing. They won't be able to keep other whales from voting forever and they don't have enough power to stop all of them when they decide to resume...or to stop new whales from participating in the future.
Unless the code is changed, this will remain temporary and arbitrary. In other words - it's nothing more than the same thing they complain about: a few users controlling the rewards/behavior of the platform's users.
I agree. The code needs to be changed to gradually reduce the voting weight as steempower increases. To offset this and to continue to attract large investors, high steempower holders need to be offered other incentives such as high interest rate on their holdings and the (exclusive) ability to vote on the structural and operational issues of the platform. Providing these additional incentives to large steem holders I believe may be enough to offset the partial loss of voting power larger holders will incur under a new voting system. Lastly the flagging system should be completely done away with for anything other than violations of agreed social norms....ie plagiarism, trolling, spam etc.
I like many others have significant amounts of steem, but will not lock it down into steem power until there issues are resolved. This festering issues (along with the question of how to monetize the attention created by this platform) have caused huge losses for investors in the past.