Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whale

I've been enjoying the Steem blockchain for years. I was introduced to this alternative social network through an interview I heard with Stan Larimer, the grandfather of DPoS (smile, for those who know the history)!

What an amazing concept! Get paid for content creation! No more censorship! Challenge the oligarchical financial system! I'm in!

But from day one, I have always, constantly heard complaints about the "Whales" having too much power. Whales? What Whales? As I searched for answers, I quickly discovered that I was a Minnow. Isn't that cute! I then discovered that Whales, which make up less than 1% of all Steemians, control the vast majority of the wealth and influence in Steemlandia. Sound familiar?!

"Help the poor Minnows," was the cry that would always go out! But the cry always fell on deaf ears, or those genuine efforts that were made to uplift the smaller community members were never satisfying enough to encourage those Minnows to stay on board and promote the platform. Hence, hundreds of thousands of accounts were abandoned. All the while, the Whales were concerned about ROI! And little was done to make the platform more enjoyable for those who were tired of being censored on other social networks, or having their favorite content creators censored.

No, it was all about upvotes, downvotes, how much can I get for my vote and how can we raise the price of STEEM. And now the Whales are wailing because a Big Bad Killer Whale has belly-flopped in our small Minnow pond!

I, and many others, warned about this; but hey, there's not much ROI that can be gained from the warnings of the masses of Minnows! So the Killer Whale Justin Sun, made a killer deal with the other Killer Whale Ned Scott, and suddenly Whales are a killer problem!