RE: Guardian of the steem universe: A different perspective on the role of whales within steem ecosystem.
I think this would be interesting experiment, but overall I don't think that it would be welcomed.
It feels good to give. If someone possesses the necessary influence to hand out rewards, then removing that opportunity from them and instead allowing them only to remove rewards would be unfair. Whales need to be able to reward posts that they find worthy of their support.
At the same time, the minnows also need to be able to feel like their vote counts for something. I have been working hard on here for at least 3 months, amounting almost 3000 STEEM power, and I still cannot award someone with a single cent through my upvote. I stopped powering up a while ago when I realised it would take years of doing so before my vote had any meaning.
I really like your line of thinking, and empowering the minnows would most definitely have a positive effect on the community. It must be so satisfying clicking the upvote button and seeing that you have given someone else a reward. I imagine that would get addictive before long, and people would want more and more STEEM power to increase how much of a reward they can give.
Give the minnows some power, some purpose, and they will give so much more back to the platform. More minnows will arrive wanting a piece of that power for themselves, and they will stay once they have had a taste of it. Many of them will love it so much that they will invest their own money into STEEM so that they can award people with a dollar, or two, or three, achieving a higher level of gratification each time.
People are sick of centralized power. It's all around society and people have had enough. If Steemit can find a way to decentralize the influence, then we will see people swarm in by the millions. That's what I think at least.
Only thing is, the more powerful the minnows are, the more susceptible the system is to abuse, so there would need to be some sort of mechanism in place to prevent such abuse, or to penalize abusers of the system.
On a secondary note, I feel that a couple of days without curation trails being used would also be a great experiment.
What is more unfair? Removing this ability for 0.2% of steemians or never give it to the other 99.8% of them.
Btw you are not really removing it because nothing prevents a whales to create a bunch of accounts under $8000 worth and upvote content with these. It just makes it more difficult and they would be better off moderating if they want to allocate funds to authors.
The proposal is aligned with the whales's interests as it will create a lot of demand for steem. It makes absolutely no sense for 99.8% of people to buy steem power now, if you align the incentives with these people the demand is guaranteed to increase and the site will be a lot more fun to be part of than it currently is. ( like you said)
I know right.
Someone gets it :) The demand increases, then the value of steem increases and the overall payouts increase.
The idea is that whales will moderate/downvote abusive minnows with their voting power. They will still have the same power that they have today so they will never be out-powered by minnows.
Thanks for your great comment, you get it man!
I'm with you on just about everything other than removing a whales right to upvote. I feel that rewarding others for hard work is one of the basic principles that Steemit was founded upon, and to take that away from someone, from anyone, is not going to be good for the community.
We already have enough animosity towards the whales. If their sole purpose became removing rewards, it would cause a huge divide, and everyone who gets their content downvoted will be out there making another post about whale hunting.
One other thing I would mention, is that it isn't 99.8% of users who lack incentive to buy STEEM power. The remaining 0.2% have so much of it that they don't need any more, and are much more inclined to be selling their STEEM rather than buying more of it. This means, it's technically 0% of informed users who have incentive to buy STEEM and power up.
I mentioned on a post a couple months ago that if users who powered up over 'x amount' per month received some sort of premium service, then demand would surely see a rise, supposing those incentives were attractive enough. It would have to be things that offer an advantage worthy of their investment, so perhaps 10 tags per post and the ability to renew(make a post appear at the top of the new list for a second time) one post a day. Slower voting power depletion could also be an option.
I feel this type of incentive would increase STEEM power holdings as well as STEEM demand and have a dramatic effect on the value of STEEM.
I digressed somewhat there. My point was, you have made some excellent proposals. I would just try and find an alternative to the whales becoming little more than payout-police.
If whales have the ability to reward posts like they do today then the whole proposal is moot.
Like I said in my post there is 129 741 accounts or 99.8% that can not rewards others. So the principle you are talking about is more of a vague concept lol
The animosity towards the whales comes from the huge disparity in influence/power. Give people influence and you won't see a lot of post bragging about the whales this, the whales that.
Their purpose is not to remove rewards, it is to allocate rewards in a scalable way and make sure that the best content gets the best reward. The current system is totally not scalable, if we were to have a huge surge in participation there would be a ton of posts that would be left completely ignored.
That's an excellent point and you are absolutely right.
Supervising all the minnows and making sure they are voting for good content in order to increase the overall value of the platform has a lot of merit.