The current incentive scheme encourages people to upvote those who already have power and thus giving them even more power.
I'm fine with the fact that whales have significantly more voting power. This is the way it needs to be: they've earned their power either by producing valuable content or by investing (and risking) their funds.
The problem
However, it's hard for me to accept this phenomena: people (and bots) upvoting posts by whales just because they were published by whales. Not because of the content of the post. Not even because of the expected quality of the post. It's mainly because a whale has voting power and it pays off to support those with power.
I don't blame people (and bots) for doing this - they do it because this behavior is explicitly encouraged by the current incentive scheme: a post by a whale is likely to be upvoted by the author himself / herself and if you upvote it early enough you get part of the reward as well.
As a result, whales with power get more and more power. They get richer just because they are already rich. Don't you think this is quite wrong? Don't you think it will turn people off once they realize this?
The solution
If I understand it correctly, currently there is a 50/50 split between authors and curators. What if we added an extra condition: as a curator you get your reward only if the post you have upvoted scores better (within e.g. 2 or 3 hours) than the average payout made by the author in the past (e.g. 2-3 weeks)? If it scores below the average, your vote is wasted and the reward you would have normally received is recycled to the reward fund and you get nothing for your curation effort.
An example
I notice that dantheman has just published a post. I can upvote it regardless of its quality but I'll risk that my voting power might be wasted this way. Instead I am encouraged to actually read the post and make a quick estimate in my head if this time dantheman is likely to receive more for this post than he usually does.
It'a a kind of a simple prediction market but without all the hassle usually associated with it. It discourages people from blindly upvoting the whales and it addresses the bot problem as well.
What do you think?
whales do not even post
Good idea actually.
@dan suggested that, I liked the idea a lot, hope they'll reconsider it.
Good thoughts, worthy of discussion. What I do is divide my votes among those that are good posts from up-and-comers (most of my votes) and those that I think are likely to be popular (I find a few each day). One other point: I was flattered to see that you mentioned me in your post. I definitely am no whale. There are around 250 people with more Steemit holdings than me, many of them way more proportionally, probably putting me at the middle or lower part of the class in terms of my voting influence. I've been fortunate to make some postings that were well rewarded, so I certainly understand if you want to encourage folks to reward others who deserve it (please do), but I just want to point out that whales and good posters are not necessarily the same people.
My bad, I should have checked the content of your wallet before using your name.
I'll amend the text, as you are indeed a different case and it might be confusing - you are an author who has a high expected value of a payout but not a whale (yet).
This might help a bit too --> Ongoing List of Steemwhales, $50K to over a $million : https://steemit.com/steem/@oliverb/steemwhale-watching-greater-than-list-of-users-you-need-to-get-upvotes-from-and-watch-for-new-content
This needs to be addressed urgently IMO
Nice post! I will follow you from now on.
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