too me the biggest problem is that 30 whales determine everything now, they consume 90% of the voting power and that's a problem

there are 10.000 regular active users per week ... that's 90.000 short from the absolute minimum this system needs to work; that's the real problem

right now those whales are determining everything ... they should dare to trust the system by lowering their own voting power consumption with 90%, so those thousands upon thousands of other votes will actually mean something

as in; if the whales were to adjust themselves to reality; we're 90% short on users, so they need to put their voting slider on 10% ... your vote would be worth 0.10 instead of 0.01 ... and that would matter

this is how I see it;
step 1; the whales lower their vote with 90%
step 2; all of a sudden everybody else's vote goes up x10 ... lot's of excitement
step 3; very fast a lot of people will return, we don't need new users (at first/for now), if we can just get a bunch of people back, that will already make a big difference
step 4; as in; after the internal balance has been restored; directly contacting known quality authors and tell them there's money to be made ... get real authors, known journalists and writers
step 5: seo; this is totally being ignored now; the best option steemit has right now to attract new users is from google traffic; more and more articles will rank in google and bring in new users
step 6 ... all pieces finally came together and all numbers will go up steadily until a story that was first published on steemit makes headline news all over the world; and boom: overnight 1.000.000 new users and price x10
step 7; we're all rich ... hahaha