Amid all the complaints about unfair rewards, etc. I wanted to explain why I think the fact that we have whales is a big reason why steemit has become so successful so quickly.
First, let me state that I am not any whale and all the STEEM I have was paid for with BTC and earned from my "taker" bot which is one of the few market maker bots that dont do wash trades. I have gotten a mega post and a decent reward post, but most of my posts get a few dollars.
There are some fundamental forces that ensure that there will always be whales, ie entropy, pareto, etc. So love them or hate them, we need to get used to them and since there seems to be enough of the latter, I will focus on the former.
Why should we love the whales? The answer is that whales create a focus and without a focus everything will be blurry. What I mean is that if we imagine a steem without whales, or even dolphins, what would it be like? Everybody's upvote would be the same. That sounds fair, but as an initial condition it has quite the undesired effect of fizzling out. What sort of headline would be "makeup blog post gets $7.77" while I like the 777 number, it wont get much buzz going. Sure, the sustainable average reward per post might well be in the $7.77 range, maybe $77.7 but there cant be an average of $777, not if there will be tens of thousands of posts per day. That is the macroeconomic reality.
Steem could very easily double its userbase each year for 10 years and sustain the current market price of STEEM, if not have it go up multiples as the userbase grows exponentially, but at some point it will reach a steady state equilibrium and the average amount per post will stabilize. Where that is, nobody knows yet.
So back to the whales. Why is it OK for a single upvote be worth $100 while most newbie upvotes are a penny or less? The reason is the chaos that is certain if all newbies had the same voting power before they adopt a common set of guidelines on how to upvote, downvote, etc. In fact, it is unlikely that any large number of people can ever agree on anything.
So, during the "big bang" period of steemit we need a non-homogeneous universe composed of whale upvotes, which act as attractors for additional posts. From that the raw energy will congregate around these whale attractors and condense into galaxies of content that revolved around the original whale attractor.
Doesnt that mean the current whales essentially won the lottery. Yes.
However, if your only complaint was "why wasnt I one of the whales", well the answer is that you werent in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills. It happens, that's life.
Now, moving forward as long as the whale's power flows to the dolphins and that flows to the minnows and there is a way for newcomers to climb the ladder with hard work, then steemit will succeed. However, if the whales create a closed circle among themselves and only upvote for each other, this will not lead to a galaxy of content.
So, I have a proposal. Adjust the upvoting reward to discourage whale for whale upvoting. I am sure @theoretical can come up with some clever algorithm that will reduce the power of a whale for whale upvoting. That will then motivate the whales to upvote for non-whales, ie dolphins and minnows and that will lead to a new generation of whales out of the current dolphins and new dolphins from the current minnows. Something like: Make the effective SP (SP of voter - SP of poster), with a minnow minimum so the whales can feel what it is like to be a minnow just by upvoting for a bigger whale. But notice that the whale's upvote using the difference in SP has most of the desired effect! In fact, it will bias whales to vote for the minnow over the dolphin, for the dolphin over small whales and why use up any power voting for bigger whales.
Even though the effective SP for the upvote is a reduced value, it should have the same effect as now as far as the dilution goes, so there is a cost for whale upvoting whale. This then ensures a steady flow of the whale upvotes to smaller and all the way down the chain, as a dolphin is now incentivized to upvote a minnow over another dolphin. Once there is an incentivized way that through continuous effort and interacting with the community a minnow can become a dolphin can become a whale, then steemit will have no obstacles to growing to millions of users.