I'm genuinely curious about this. When so much voting power is concentrated in so few accounts, their own self-interest would seem to potentially conflict with the interests of the less wealthy bloggers.
While I agree that the whales want to prevent the whole system from coming crashing down (to preserve their own wealth), the fact they are so self-interested in their own stake versus the community as a whole is an issue that a lot of users are trying to find a solution to. There has to be a balance that would appeal to both the Hive oligarchy and the rest in order to improve the appearance of decentralization - while still allowing a mechanism for dealing with plagiarism and fraud-like over-rewarding. Or am I just being too naïve?
There's not that much stake concentrated into a few accounts, smaller bloggers could easily band together and counter it. I know that if a bad whale would start downvoting something that's not controversial/borderline dangerous content I and many others would step in to counter it - so maybe there just isn't that much interest to help these people getting downvoted. Similarly how there isn't much interest to engage with most of these content creators looking at dbroze, highimpactflix, and some others who are apparently big "influencers". It's all just autovotes for the most part and now some are saying it needs to stop, they need to get a smaller pie from the rewardpool because such content while it's possible to exist here isn't bringing hive any value. Most of people crying about it are the ones cashing in on being left alone.
Thanks for responding, I'm really trying to better understand the mechanics of the downvoting and how much HP it takes to effectively zero a post. Looking at Effective HP on HiveBuzz, there's 36 accounts with >500k HP, which is probably enough for each of them to zero several popular posts a day. I'll have to search around some more to find a breakout of the HP distribution curve across all accounts as that might help inform me a bit more on the concentration, or lack thereof, of HP.
You're right, there apparently isn't enough interest for the "masses" to band together to counteract the big downvotes even though they may have enough HP to do it.
With regards to engagement, I remember a post of yours a while back that asked us to look at our comment to posting ratio and that certainly changed my perspective and I shifted a lot more of my time to commenting and engagement instead of just posting Actifit updates every day.
Perhaps a new focus on rewarding comments more than a primary post would move things more in the right direction with regards to rewarding the content most beneficial to the platform? Not sure if that's even implementable, but it's an interesting thought.
If folks observed the 1000mv vote limit we could end this issue immediately, but greed won't let them.
https://peakd.com/utopian-io/@paulag/the-impact-of-unused-steempower-on-the-rewards-pool-blockchain-business-intelligence
hmmm interesting idea to cap the vote value a single account can give. It'd certainly make it more difficult for the whales to exert control if they had to spread their HP across thousands of accounts and operate them in unison to maintain the same vote power. But I'm guessing that in order for a change like that to take place in a hardfork, the whales would have to vote to make themselves less powerful... and we know they won't do that!
It does seem a longshot, but with proper organizing of the small accounts we can maybe shame them into it.
It would have to be voluntary, but self discipline is the hardest.
Sooo, good luck getting them to do that.
Great as it would be were they to actually surrender power.
If they would, we could bring back the n2 and organize trending with actually popular stuff.
That's great to hear, we've shifted a lot of our focus on rewarding social content creators rather than those who just blog and dash, unless they're content is exceptional and they also link back to Hive on their other socials or have a big influence over there. If two content creators on Hive have the same quality of posts but one is not active at all or only replies "thanks" to comments on their posts while the other is going around connecting with others, leaving them comments and genuinely growing and receiving more manual votes, etc, we much rather reward that one than the other. It's one of the perks of curating manually and having many checkpoints we have nominations of posts from communities go through that we're able to place the votes where we really think authors deserve them and are bringing value to Hive in more ways than just the content.
We've recently added comment nominations as well which we give a 1-2% vote with ocdb but it's not as active, I'm going to figure out how to incentivize it to become more active down the line, though. In general I think not curating the unsocial ones as much could be incentive enough to want to become more. Only wish autovoters would check for the same things.