The reality is that they can, and will downvote, or vote, for whatever they want.
Here's the solution: Seize all of the whale's assets and force them to become normal people, while sending their current Steem Power to "@null", which would instantly give every non-whale nearly equal, or at least fair voting power.
Everyone would then have a fair vote, and would actually have to "buy in" with their own money, instead of just getting lucky because they found the platform first.
By this I mean, act as if the first "wave of Steemit popularity" had not happened, and no one was able to become a whale due to luck. Nullify all existing power structures, and start from scratch.
This makes Steemit more accessible, because everyone can donate multiple cents per vote, as long as they buy in even at the $500 level, rather than the $10000+ dollar level. It makes it reasonable to want to invest in Steem, because just a small, sane investment is actually worth something.
This would probably improve Steemit long term.
Of course, this solution is dishonest theft and forcefully manipulating the platform, so I don't think I can support this.
But if morality is what you've after, good luck choosing.
It comes down to wanting fairness long term, but only if you commit a grand crime of theft, vs unfairness long term, but there is no theft or wrong doing on your part.
Seizing anything is a slippery slope. That's how all bad things begin. I'd rather them change the UI or even remove the ability of the down vote to impact posts in certain ways.
Seizing assets is NOT a door you want to open. At that point confidence level in steem as a currency would plummet. How is that any different from the government seizing gold, bank accounts, etc from people?
That is a big reason people use crypto currency so things like that cannot happen.
I truly despise how these guys are using the down vote and I consider it potentially the worst thing occurring on the platform at this time. I speak up about it quite a bit. Yet, I do not support seizing of assets. This historically is a VERY bad thing that people tend to justify exactly for reasons like this, and long term this would not be beneficial, in the long term this would be bad. It is only short term that it might seem beneficial.
I think you guys didn't finish reading the comment..
And yes... I did read it, but my response was not to @krnel here. :)
I was responding to @heretickitchen's comment... not the original, thus why it is nested. I responded to the original post with a comment of my own.
It would destroy Steemit because why would anyone invest money in a platform when it could arbitrarily be stolen? I would power down immediately if something like this ever happened.
Yeah, I would too, but at the same time, don't you think the platform is unsustainable as it is? People can't buy in to gain voting power.
The sheer amount necessary to give you influential power is too high.
I will never be able to get voting power my entire career on Steemit, because I earn money here. I need to buy food with the meager amounts of money I make, so I can't just afford to become truly part of the community.
I think the only solution is for whales to have their power converted into something else, so they don't feel cheated, but yeah, we need the whales to disappear, so that everyone's vote is worth something, even if it's all worth much less.
It'll start to add up, right? Plus, people will have an incentive to buy in, because even a little SP would end up allowing them to have fun voting and giving people spare change, instead of literally nothing except a platitude level vote.
Your vote carries weight, and it nearly always has, right?
But for me, a person who's been on Steemit for months, but still has a worthless vote, it's disheartening to know that my vote will always be worth zero, or at best, maybe a single cent.
I'm not sure what the solution is. There has been some talk of changing the vote weight from the current n^2 to something more like n * log n. This would flatten out the power curve somewhat and give more proportional voting weight to lower SP accounts. Something like this might help.
This should be tried before anything else.
EDIT: Your later comment about how it is unfair to existing stakeholders is absolutely true. I was explicitly told by a key founder that a reason to power up and stay in the system instead of dumping the coins I mined was that I would receive 50% (not '25%', or more accurately 12%, as is currently the case) curation rewards and they would be very superlinear (which was subsequently reduced, but still somewhat superlinear). I was also likewise advised to combine my stake into a single account because that would receive even higher rewards by doing so (which no longer is the case)
Now the fact that all of these have been reneged upon and my property has been damaged, repeatedly, by rule changes, does indeed reduce my enthusiasm for the system and for sticking with it. Flattening the rewards would further do so. However, there does seem to be wide support for trying it. If it makes the platform more successful maybe that would be worth it. I'm open to trying it, but other large stakeholders may not be, and I wouldn't criticize them if that is the case.
I have another solution, but I'd rather talk about it privately via PM on the chat website.
That's implying socialism is always bad.
It's not. It is simply untrue to say that socialism is inherently bad in every situation.
Also, the idea that they "deserve to reap the rewards" doesn't make sense on a platform like Steemit.
This isn't just a currency. If it was, then I'd agree.
But this is meant to be a community, and when the people with voting power are literally ALL early adopters, and other people, no matter how dedicated to the community, have about $10 worth of votes between them, the disparity is absurd.
Soo..no one should ever invest in anything early because if they do, the unfairness police will come and steal it from them.
Should the price of Steem ever reach 10$ Your account would be worth about 16000$ and your votes might be about 5 cents or so. No doubt you'd be happy to hand that over to someone who just joined that day, to keep things fair.
thats not socialism tho
That sort of thing could help, but I really think the most vital operation is to eliminate the "lucky whales".
To be a whale, you should have had to have invested actual money, or saved your way up to whale power over time. These whales that appeared just at the beginning of Steemit's existence? They just got lucky, so it feels legitimately unfair that they have so much power, despite not investing anything.
But still, theft is theft, and that might also include changing the algorithm, to "steal" their voting power. It'd be like saying "Well, the rich people in the USA are so rich, that we'll just devalue money until a million dollars is worth nothing, while making sure food and housing is still affordable by the average people."
I mean, I dunno if that makes sense, but yeah, I feel like any solution can potentially have troubles to it.
I have to disagree with you here. If a person discovers something early and invests in it, and then it goes big. They deserve to reap the rewards. Using force to prevent this would just be another form of socialism.
Lot's of new technologies/companies don't make it. Investing in them at that early stage is risky.
Nobody finished reading the comment :P
I did read that part.
that comment that included socialism was wrong
rip cant reply because limit
Care to elaborate?
socialism is abashment of private ownership of the means of production
market socialism and anarchist forms exist