steemit

It has been my experience over the past few weeks that Steemit is descending quite rapidly into a situation where the above definition is being applied almost verbatim.
The problem is that this incentivizes the individual, not the community as a whole. When all users start doing this, voting on a "sure shot", we only further centralize the reward pool on a small minority, and leave minnows with little reward for their efforts.

Unfortunately, I, like you all, are witnessing firsthand the effect that this selfish voting imparts. Our famous actors are becoming more famous, to the point where the few who realize have begun using their fame to promote lists of hidden gems and featured authors. But they still gain the steem power, getting fatter and fatter.
A second issue is fairness, and the distribution of reward from the reward pool. I have strong opinions on content, enough to continuously butt heads with several whales (no names -- no need to brigade).

The fact is that whales have the ability to make a post trend instantly. This can be a good thing or a bad thing -- given a benevolent whale, a really strong minnow post can be put into the spotlight despite the user not having a large following. But if the quality of the post is low, we run into a very distinct issue: users view the front page as a metric to gauge successfulness of their own posts. Then it becomes a case of "monkey see, monkey do", where the average user, seeing plagiarism, copy paste, and low-quality posts on the front page, contemplates their risk to reward of each and every blog post.
Personally, I feel that Steemit should NOT be a news aggregation source, unless the provider of the information IS a news source. In this case, I believe people who copy paste articles that are not their own, whether or not it contains a source, should NOT be encouraged. This is equivalent to the difference in a reddit post or facebook status. Do you copy paste the article to reddit? NO! You just have a link and promote (and provide) discussion. Do you make your facebook status a full article? NO! You just have a link and promote (and provide) discussion.

We can do so much better than that; Steemit is something new and original. Lets be original too.