I think the real issue is that the whales are lazy. They don't want to log in every day for an hour and find five interesting posts to upvote. Instead, they've just selected a few authors, and then let their bots upvote everything they write regardless.

If this platform was closed to new sign-ups, that would be a rational strategy, as they would have found all the good authors, so why not automate. However, it is still an open platform, so fixing their "preferred" lists so early, simply excludes the majority.

And then there is the Harper Lee issue - what if someone just has one stonkingly good post in them? They get completely overlooked, as they arn't on the known lists.

Also - initially when I signed up, I thought this place could replace reddit. However, I still need to go to reddit to find breaking news. It is pointless doing live blogs of events here, because they get buried in the endless stream of articles about steem, introduce me stuff, and the stuff of the preferred list of authors (who mainly seem to photograph flowers).