Some issues have been discussed by high profile members of the community recently, here a are a couple of posts
Is Everybody Heading For the Doors - @gavett
Increasing Curation, Demand for Steem Power, and Community Interaction - @ned
I think there is a fundamental underlying reason for these issues - the N Squared voting power law. I made a post about this recently.
Your Votes Don't Matter ~ Back of the Envelope Steem Power Madness Calculations
To give some more background on the issue, here is a screenshot from the Steem Whitepaper [PDF], with my annotations.
I think this shows that there are reasons to use a nonlinear function for voting, but there is no truly compelling reason to use a n^2 law. We have real world data now that shows that n^2 is too extreme (posts with 100 votes often do not earn as much as posts with e.g. one whale vote for example).
Even projects like project Curie could not be successful until they onboarded large whales such as @berniesanders. This would not be necessary if dolphins had real voting power.
Let's see how a N to the 1.1 power law would compare to the N squared law.
More analysis is needed, but I wanted to get this out there since we are discussing this in the Beyond Bitcoin channel today.
Follow @nonlinearone for more great pics and posts.