RE: Is everybody heading for the doors? The narrative and the truth.
I would say it's not the end of the world - but as a scientist and web marketer for the past 15 or so years ... looking at those charts for the last month is not encouraging. I still think a fundamental change to how money is distributed based on votes needs to happen. E.g. change the voting power function from n^2 to something more sane, say the 1.1 power, so that most user's votes are more meaningful. Perhaps keep the flag power at a higher ratio if people insist on that (E.g. flag vote power could go like n^1.5 while upvote power goes like n^1.1).
This is important because new users who invest some money or time should get some kind of meaningful reward for the SP they have.
As it is now, putting in $500 of one's hard earned money (or equivalent amount of time) is a waste of time/money. Why? 500SP is basically nothing at all compared to accounts with 5k, 10k, 100k, 500k, etc.
New users may not know all of this, but they do know that their votes and the votes of their new friends don't seem to count for diddly squat (unless they friend a whale).
Good point. You put in $10000 and you get much less influence per dollar then 100,000. Or do I misunderstand? At the same time, whales use their power to keep the site working well, so some extra power, like n^1.2 may be appropriate.
Yes, exactly. So, for instance I have like $2,000 worth of SP. My votes are worth one or two cents. Who will be willing to invest TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS so their vote can be worth one or two cents? I ended up doing some back of the envelope calculations and posted the results in a new post https://steemit.com/steempower/@nonlinearone/your-votes-don-t-matter-back-of-the-envelope-steem-power-madness-calculations