RE: What's Important to Steemit’s Longevity? - Inspiried by @anyx ‘Tragedy of The Commons’
Replying here due to nesting
I absolutely do believe that whales are far more likely to promote a largely variety of content from unknown sources than a swarm of users.
OK, i see what youre saying... that with the swarm voting it would be tougher for an unknown to break into the top of the trending page. I don't necessarily agree with that either, but i do see the distinction.
To me personally, the whole issue is wrapped in quality. I don't think most people's issue with the trending page is that its so hard to break into it. Its that very bad content frequently ends up on the trending page. While very good content ends up lost 84 pages from the top.
For example, I just saw that @dollarvigilante has the most followers on the platform at 2000.
I think TDV is a bad example for a bunch of reasons, but lets use him anyway. My guess is that TDV probably also has the most earnings of any author since they started offering a feed and made the "follow" button do something. Id further guess that if you went down the list of "most followers" you would find an ordered list of the highest earners since the follow button was enabled with some well known whales like berniesanders, you dan and ned who don't post much interspersed.
Of course, youll say that of course theyre the highest earners. They get all that money because they have so many followers. And ill say "No, they get all those followers because whales pin them to the top of the trending page 24/7" Its kind of a chicken and egg debate.
incidentally, i texted an old girlfriend who is a magazine editor with the use of quotation marks above, and asked her what she thought
"The punctuation is correct, but no editor in her right mind would let you use that. You're putting words in someone else's mouth"
so i guess my bad.