I have no problems with them having power. I don't have problems with people seeking it.
In a free market I could generate great ideas, be rewarded for them, and achieve my own power/wealth.
The system here is designed so any reward I get the whales that up voted it get a share of that reward based upon how powerful they are. The more power they get the more reward they get.
By this mechanism they will always be above people regardless of the effort of the content creator. It thus is not a free market. It is something that hasn't existed before as far as I can tell.
Right now the reward split is 50% content creator, 50% curators.
While the curators are rewarded by how soon they voted AND how powerful they are.
So if a powerful person gave me 100 worth of power and they were the only person up voting they would get 100 power as well. If other people voted they'll get a percentage based upon their position in the voting AND the power of their vote.
They get this for anything they vote on.
So I get 100 power for my creation. They get 100 power or close for every vote they made that day.
Thus I can increase by 100 power and they can say increase by 1000 power in the same day simply from voting (best case scenario for them).
Thus the gap between them and other people will only widen IF they participate in the system.
This only applies to the most powerful... because it is possible truly powerful accounts could up vote someone they really like and help them leap frog many other whales.
They simply would never catch up to the person voting them up regardless of the quality of their content.
If the truly powerful did nothing with their account but collect interest it would be theoretically possible to catch up to them.
This isn't a free market thing.
It is actually a very controlled and manipulated market.
I use Hive Vote to upvote automatically. I vote and sometimes larger whales can vote after I do. When whales upvote after me, then I am rewarded for voting before the total price of a post goes up high enough. I have no idea what high enough means and I guess it depends on how many people vote on a post, when they vote, the weight, the total payout after 7 days, the details of the rewards pool in contrast with all the other posts and payouts and everything.
Hive Vote Boost
But what I do know is since I started using Hive Vote back in like May or June of 2021, my HP went from around like 700 or 800 HP to 960 HP. And REP went from like 63.1 to 63.5 REP in these past several months too. I know when compared to the largest whales, these numbers are very small perhaps. But in my little mind, I am at least a little excited about perceived or alleged progress. I cannot say or prove that what I am saying is a very big deal but I do know the numbers are going up a bit faster.
On Hive, I'm 63.5 REP, and 60 REP on Steemit where I still copy and paste my blog to. But I am not doing auto-voting or any other voting on Steemit as I only use it to mirror my blog. But this contrast shows me Hive Vote is helping me a little and that is better than nothing I guess and so I am content about that to say the least and will take whatever I can get and take it a day at a time.
The higher your reputation becomes the slower it advances. It is an exponential curve I believe.
Why is my REP going up faster and faster at this point?
It is based upon the power of people up voting you and I think their reputation. So since I have a decent reputation as I up vote you it will make your rep go up.
Yet the cost to get to the next level is exponential. My Rep went up REALLY fast for awhile and then slowed down dramatically even though I get a lot of up votes.
Basically be happy it is going up but don't be surprised when it slows way down. That is normal. It just means you haven't hit the exponential cost yet that has slowed down more.
If you are a gamer... instead of a level costing 1000 experience points no matter what level you are. You have level 2 costs 1000 experience points, level 3 costs 2000 more experience points (3000 total), level 4 costs 4000 more experience points, etc.
I don't remember if it is binary for reputation so that curve may be more extreme than the one being used but it IS something like that.
EDIT: Reputation may not care about power of the up vote at all. It may be based exclusively on the reputation of the up vote OR down vote.
This was implemented so high reputation people could hide and obliterate spam, plagiarism, porn blatant, etc. without requiring massive power.
At the time it was created there were a horde of bots that had been powered up that we posting fake posts and up voting each other. They had more power than the people who would be willing to police the issue.
Thus reputation was implemented.
It's been awhile there may have been something about rep only increasing when up voted by someone with a better rep than you so people couldn't use their bots to vote back and forth and drive their rep up.
As long as you have people higher rep than you up voting you your rep should increase.
I think that is actually why it gets slower because as your rep gets higher it is less likely the people up voting you will have a higher reputation than you do.
According to the numbers I was looking at, higher REP represents an increased amount of the VEST points. I was studying the numbers on I think a few different numbers and it looks like each higher REP is bigger. I thought maybe you would have saw this. I was looking at this some years ago back when it was still Steemit. I should probably write an article about it because maybe other people are not aware of this as well.
Nah... VEST is your Hive Power it was Steem Power on Steemit.
Reputation came into being after that. I was around when it happened. The way it is designed someone with a higher rep can down vote you / flag you and hide your content. It is still on the chain but just not visible. This will also lower your reputation because they are higher than you.
When someone higher rep than you up votes your post it increases your reputation some. It is just a number that has nothing to do with vests as far as I can tell.
If I remember correctly anyone higher reputation than you can increase or lower your reputation. I do know that each level of rep costs more. Keep in mind as you increase in reputation eventually there will be fewer and fewer people higher reputation than you that are up voting your posts. Thus, your reputation will advance much slower.
When you are lower it advances quickly because so many people that up vote you will have a higher reputation.
It took me a bit to recall it all. I was around when they created reputation and I witnessed first hand why they needed it.
At the time there were massive hordes of spam and keeping up with them would be a full time job and then some for people. Plus without reputation if the spam / plagiarism / etc was posted by an account more powerful than you you couldn't stop it by yourself.
Reputation is used to combat this. It works quite well. I simply forgot the mechanism about how it increased until I thought about it.
You may encounter people with negative reputation. They have been down voted so many times by people that their reputation is now negative.
If I recall reputation used to start at 25. I don't know if that is still the case for new accounts.
Another way to put, to the best of my understanding like I said already, each REP number is like a harder level, to use an analogy, imagine a Nintendo Super Mario video game level, and imagine that each level is longer, and it is possible that I'm wrong or a little inaccurate about how REP works but this is what I remember when I was looking at the correlation between REP and the VEST points or whatever they are called, I think they are called VEST which gets larger and larger in like an exponential rate per REP point. I will need to do an investigation to verify this but it makes sense to me.
As I said in the other post. VEST is another name for your STAKED Hive... aka Hive Power.
I could show you all this more clearly if I knew what the equivalent of steemd was for hive. Steemd let you explore the blockchain in a very different way and pull raw numbers and such.
Is it true that 100% of an upvote goes to the voter, the curator, after 5 minutes on Hive? Back on Steemit, it was set at 15 or 30 minutes, something like that. I recently read on Quora.com and I think other places too that it is at 5 minutes currently. I don't know but that may be the case.