Concentration of wealth is a common complaint, especially for those who don't happen to be part of the top one or ten percent. Lots of people have studied it in the world at large and in various countries and it seems to be the default option that just about any kind of economy naturally reverts to.
When it comes to cryptocurrencies, they also suffer from a certain concentration of wealth, and Steem Power is no different. You can see from this picture taken from Steemd that one percent of Steemit account holders control over 93 percent of the influence. To put it even more starkly, just 46 accounts wield up to 63 percent of the influence on the platform.
Lots of people have complained about the Steemit influence distribution and I don't want to add to the complaints other than to note that it's a Steemit fact that many people have identified as a problem to solve. A number of solutions have been proposed, all of which in some way would reduce the amount of influence currently held by those top 46 accounts.
I do not believe any of the solutions I've seen would result in making the distribution of influence on Steemit significantly more even. I believe that concentration of wealth is a strong force no matter what the wealth is and where it's located. People can rail against it, write academic papers about it, and even stage revolutions against it, and in the end the best they can do is change the players while the wealth remains concentrated.
I do not know a whole lot about the history of Steemit, but I'm going to make an assumption that one of the goals of the Steemit founders was to provide a platform where people could prosper who would have a much more difficult time doing so in real (offline) life. I believe this assumption is valid for the simple reason that many people who get into cryptocurrencies or launch new cryptocoins have mentioned that goal. To take my assumption further, I believe that one of the goals of the Steemit founders was to reduce the hard to breach distinction between the have much(es) and the have nots that we tend to see in the current global economy. And I believe that to some extent they have succeeded, something I'll go into a bit further down in this essay.
Even with all that good intention, the picture shows that there is a concentration of wealth on Steemit, confirming for me that it takes a lot to have anything other than that, and that it might be close to impossible. I don't believe you can code a way out of wealth concentration either, no matter how much you might want to.
With all that said, I do believe there is something positive that each Steemit user can do which could to some extent mitigate wealth concentration in an organic and sustainable way that does not in any way violate free will. It's what I kind of stumbled on when I first launched the wantwiserupvote initiative. Since the primary wealth of Steemit is influence I believe there is a unique opportunity to experiment to see if what I propose could work on a large scale.
The wantwiserupvote initiative is based on what I and many others have observed to be a human reality that for the most part we humans tend to limit our interactions to our circles of close family and friends. We could each have many circles or communities within which we interact, such as church communities, social clubs, meetup groups, our families, our friends, our children's school communities and so forth. Even within those circles we tend to limit who we interact with most. It's not wrong to do that; it's normal human nature. We tend to hang out with the people we like and we kind of like it that way. With the Internet, we've managed to considerably expand our circles (at least online) but the same principle applies.
The way this works out on Steemit is that when you first join, you will very quickly build up a small or medium sized circle of friends with whom you will interact with most. That circle is likely to consist mostly of people who joined around the same time you did. In other words, your circle will consist primarily of other minnows just like you. You'll all follow each other and read, comment on and upvote each other's work.
At first, because you're all minnows, the votes won't really help in terms of building your influence. However, let's suppose that you and most of the people in your Steemit circle do really well here and you all become whales together. As whales, you continue to do what you've done from the beginning: you read, comment and upvote on each other's work. The only difference is that since you're all whales, your upvotes do add to each other's influence, and they get noticed by others who might start complaining that all you whales ever do is upvote each other. This basically happened with all the founding members as they worked closely together to build and invest in this platform; when it launched successfully they became the big influencers (or whales) and well, they kept right on interacting with each other, further enriching themselves as a group.
No one in the above scenario was or is doing anything intrinsically wrong. Since when has interacting with people in your circles been a crime? It's human nature. That's all.
In order for human beings to consistently go outside of their circles, they have to firmly intend to do so. It is not going to happen by itself. This is just as true on Steemit as it is everywhere else in the world.
Once you have gotten used to the Steemit platform, if you want to reach out beyond the circle you establish for yourself, then you have to make that your intention and then you have to do it. It's actually much easier to reach out on Steemit than in real life--for me it's been a simple matter of perusing the introduceyourself tag and reading and upvoting some of those posts. But I do have to actually click on the introduceyourself tag and then do the reading and upvoting. I'm sure there are other ways to reach out, but that happens to be the way I've found to work best for me.
The next thing you have to do is provide a way for the new people you "meet" to join your circle. They might follow you, or you might follow them. In this way you improve your odds of your paths crossing again. In my case, I invite them to tag their future posts (up to one a day) with the wantwiserupvote tag. Then I check the tag daily and read, upvote, and sometimes comment on their work. In this way I begin the process of building a relationship with these new Steemit users and some of them then become a more permanent part of my circle.
If I stop there, then all I would have done was add a few more people to my circle that I then limit my interactions to. So I had to take another step, which I realized yesterday. That step is to continue to reach out beyond my circle. Initially I had thought to reach out (peruse the introduceyourself tag) until I got enough people tagging their posts with wantwiserupvote so I'd have more posts using it than I could possibly upvote. Then I got to thinking that I'd have to start all over once they all graduated from small minnowhood (accumulated more than 2,000 SP in their wallets). Instead of doing that, I'd just allocate a certain amount of my daily upvotes specifically to reaching out. For now I've settled on three votes each day that I vote, but that number might change depending on what I experience. Even if I completely fill up the wantwiserupvote tag I am going to continue to reach out, because I realize that reaching out beyond my circle in and of itself is worthwhile.
This brings me to what I want to encourage each and every Steemit user to do: Reach Out. First, make reaching out your intention. Second, make a plan to consistently reach out. Third, do it. Do not expect reaching out to just happen by itself for you. It won't, at least not consistently. Fortunately, once you make it your intention, make your plan, and then do it, it's really not too difficult to do. Reaching out on Steemit is really not as much of a sacrifice as it can be in real life as so many of the logistical difficulties simply aren't present on Steemit.
How does reaching out mitigate the Steemit uneven distribution of wealth?
I believe that if the 46 largest account holders put this into practice (for simplicity's sake let's assume they do pretty much the same thing that I'm doing with the wantwiserupvote initiative), the effect will be that a lot more small minnows will find their posts blessed with high value upvotes, which will result in those small minnows building their influence much more quickly than they otherwise would. If those small minnows are also educated about reaching out, then they too might reach out in similar ways to the small minnows coming in behind them, essentially paying it forward. Over time there would be a larger pool of people on Steemit intentionally reaching out, translated by upvoting users who do not yet have Steemit influence. I believe this will result in the influence wealth going out to a wider pool of Steemit users which could over time result in a more even distribution of wealth. I believe it's certainly worthwhile to give it a try. Remember, reaching out is worth doing even for its own sake.
This has to be voluntary
Having said all the above, I want to emphasize emphatically that this reaching out for the purpose of sharing influence with small minnows cannot in any way be coerced. Each and every Steemit user who intentionally reaches out has to come to this decision freely. It's really not going to work for you if you don't want to do it.
Don't wait for the current whales to jump on board
Although I mentioned above that we could see some results fairly quickly if the 46 top account holders got on board with this, I'm neither waiting for them to do it, nor making it my mission to market this to them. What I'm doing will either catch on or it won't, and in the end, if I'm the only one doing it, it's still worth doing. If you believe reaching out to be worth doing but believe that the SP in your wallet is lacking, then do it anyway. If nothing else, you will establish some good whale habits before you become a whale. It might ultimately be better for you for the influence you can bestow to grow with you so you can grow (mature) right along with the power you wield. But there is also the fact that in doing something you consider to be worthwhile with a little wealth, you will become more motivated to build your wealth more effectively so that you have greater ability to do that worthwhile thing. In other words, if you start behaving like you have the influence wealth now, that behavior just might have an impact on your actually gaining that influence wealth for real.
There is more than one way to gain influence on Steemit
I mentioned earlier that the creators of Steemit have largely succeeded in their goal to make it easier to breach the distinction between the have much(es) and the have nots at least within the context that Steemit operates. On Steemit, the wealth is influence, and how that influence gets wielded is already written into the code. In other words, it's impartial. If you have the influence, you can wield it. It doesn't matter how long you've held it or how you got it. It's not like there's any discrimination against "new money." Nor is there any sort of looking down on gaining wealth through certain professions considered to be dishonorable as opposed to other professions. I'm not talking about anything criminal here, just something along the lines of being a garbage collector vs. a doctor or lawyer.
The social media marketers have discovered they can do exceedingly well on Steemit by simply doing what they do on social networks in general. Here is just one example.
Another way to gain influence on Steemit is to simply buy it. Steem Power is derived from Steem, which at the end of the day is a cryptocurrency just like any other traded on a trading platform. If you want more Steem Power and don't want to wait to earn it by posting content on Steemit, just buy it. You can buy it all at once or a little bit at a time. With Steem currently valued at 23 cents you can pick up a lot of it by simply regularly giving up small things like a cup of coffee at Starbucks, a pack of cigarettes, or a movie in the theater. You could also sell some of your stuff directly for Steem on the newly formed @Steemshop.
I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to gain Steemit influence. If it's important to you, you'll figure out a way and do it. In other words, becoming a Steem whale is within everyone's grasp. It's much easier to get wealthy on Steemit than it is in other areas of life. Kudos to the founders for making that dream possible! You can work your plan to gain influence wealth and develop good whale habits, especially reaching out, along the way.
