The problem
A lot of quality content and discussions go unnoticed and unrewarded (< $1 rewards with dozens/hundreds of upvotes). In the mean time, some people ("followed by the whales") are consistently rewarded thousands of dollars for anything they post.
Why?
Inequality. If only one or two whales follow someone (either by bots or manually), their posts will be consistently awarded hundreds of dollars and guaranteed visibility. At the same time, the vast majority of users' upvotes are worth so little (about $0.0001) that even hundreds of them don't add up to a single dollar.
Proposed solutions
We need to find ways to efficiently redistribute Steem Power. Rather than one user's upvote weighting $100, we want a thousand users' upvotes to be worth $0.1 each. Here are some ideas on how to achieve this:
1.
The whales need to stop following people. They should spend most of their time looking at the "new" or "hot" (which is influenced by the number of upvotes rather than their worth) pages. Look for posts with lots of upvotes and comments but little reward. These are usually worth discovering.
2.
We may want to introduce a ceiling for author rewards. That could help avoid bandwagon upvoting and posts reaching unrealistically high payouts. Let's be honest, no post is worth tens of thousands of dollars. Authors should be happy with a few hundred dollars tops. That means, the rest of the money would be spread out between more otherwise unnoticed content.
3.
The ability to assign a percentage weight to each of your upvotes is already implemented in the system. If this was available on the steemit.com interface, whales would have an easier time distributing rewards fairly. This way, even if a whales full upvote is worth say $100, they could use their voting power to reward a post with just $1, $10 or whatever they find reasonable.
4.
Rather than worrying about the spam bots whose comments can already be hidden by a single downvote, the community needs to actively find ways to redistribute steem wealth (for example, see my attempt here)
Summary
I would like see a better spread of rewards between more quality content and a better spread of voting power between more users. I believe something in the ballpark of a few hundreds bucks per top trending post and an average of about $0.1 per upvote would be feasible and desirable.
What do you think?