A tiny opinion about Steem power: how wealth influences our community

Steem power makes steem attractive and it can be as addictive as your mothers' homemade pancakes, you just want more and more. But what exactly does this magical token have of effect on our community as a social media that depends on... wealth?

Let's discuss!

The attraction of STEEM POWER

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Steem power is great, it attracts people to invest and it has a huge impact on the price of steem. The more Steempower we lock in place, the less liquid steem can be for sale and that means higher steem prices. The thought of how much returns you can have holding steem power for a couple of years makes people want more and more. Even despite the fact of steem price, you will basically have a quite significant passive income during bear markets.

Haven't we all had the thought "If only I had more steem power"*

While the thought can be irritating for the individual, it is a good sign for steem. Since it is a prove just by listening to our own thought how attractive steem power actually is.

I have not even asked other people if they think this, but usually, the rule is if you have thought about it, it is 99% sure that a lot of others have thought the same.

But it does come awfully close to the original "If only I had more money" scenario.

How steem power are shaping the behavior of the community

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The more steem power you have, the more people will come flocking to your account regardless of how meaningful your content is. If you are sitting on a 100k steem power there's no hiding, people will find you and they want your votes. I am doing it, you are doing it, we are all doing it to some extent.

Need example? Let's take a look at the most "recent" hot topic when a new high stakeholder appeared: @dhenz. He just brought a whopping 250k steem power and it is great to see people still got the guts to jump in with both feet if I had that money I would do the same. I admire him for his decision but it also showed a clear sign of how influenced everybody is by steem power. If you look at his announcement you will notice how many "known" faces came flocking to his post. It was one big gathering of whales, a rare sight.

Of course, there can be a lot of motivations for this, such as making sure those who do choose to make these huge investments feel at home and integrate him into the community of whales. It is important to keep our big investors happy. It is, after all, those who are gonna make the steem price rise. But it is interesting to see how these "whale" accounts attracts this kind of attention.

You would have to be blind if you cannot see how steem power, in general, are influencing our behavior towards other people. We are attracted to those who are either successful and even better, could make ourselves successful.

People get attracted by success and steempower= success.

alternative reality: 1 account = 1 vote

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While this idea seems to have been floating around for a while, I first heard it at @therealwolf post that you can see here. (he also explains it a bit deeper)

Let me ask you this question if we had a system such as the notorious "1 account = 1 vote". For those of you unaware of this proposal it basically means that all accounts got the same value in their votes but they can only vote once.

There's a lot of details to this solution and I am not gonna talk too much about it despite the fact that suddenly everyone's votes would be equal... For the better or the worse.

But if I try to imagine how steemit and its community would be behaving with this system, it would be unrecognizable. Since suddenly you are shaping your success based on how many people like your articles instead of WHO likes your article.

The people you follow would be different and the people who follow you would be different, the interaction would be different. In other words, those we follow would depend on the topic they are writing and their talent. Much less about their wealth.

Would it be great to see this change? for the health of the platform, yes. It would suddenly be "the voice of the people" instead of "the voice of the rich". I like this idea, some don't and that is fair. There's arguments for both sides.

Would it be good the health of steem? that would be questionable. There are many proposals to how this system could work and still maintain steem power as being attractive but such a drastic change could be truly risky for the investors of steem.

Nonetheless, we got steem power as it is now and there's no denying it alters the way we behave for the better and worse. It is important to keep steem and steem power attractive for investors for the health of the steem price, but it does come at a cost

at least for some.

What do you think of steem power?

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Before we start the fight I want to mention a few factors:

I accept the reality that nothing will be fair or perfect. But that does not mean we cannot try to get close to it. Is steem power fair? I guess it is fair in the sense that stakeholders and investors should see the reward for their decision of risking their own money.

But in the other hand it also means if you have money, you can be successful on steemit. if you don't, better work hard for it. That does create an uneven playing field on something that is social media and specifically on steemit, where the quality of your articles does not mean everything... in fact, it means awfully little.

I would still claim, that those who are already professional bloggers should know how hard it is to even earn a cent at the beginning of your career. More often than not it takes years before you will start to see a financial return.

The fact you can buy yourself to a carrier on the stem blockchain might not be too bad. But it is a stopper for the average person, but maybe that is fine?

So many reflections on this subject, so I am just gonna ask:

What do you think about steem power?

-holm