I would like to offer a contrary opinion, hopefully whales will be respectful rather than domineering and not mute it.

I like Steem and Steemit, but not very much. With sincere respect for you, mischaro, I feel your post is inaccurate in the message it promotes. This post suggests that Steemit is a meritocracy, and while I really wish it was, it isn't.

Why do I say that? Because I have seen many minnow accounts become inactive, much more frequently than with Facebook or other sites. Why is this happening? Because Steemit promises something that it does not actually provide: meritocracy.

In fact, I'm working on a site called hobo.media, and while it had one intention, it is being redesigned (its not ready right now) because I wanted to create a space for people like Venezuelans that could write content and receive compensation in crypto. I'm not going to say anymore on that, because my goal here is not to shill.

Anyways, a true social media meritocracy would compensate people for effortful work, but that's not what gets paid. Bots get paid, whales get paid, investors get paid, and minnow content writers go unseen until they ditch the place and move on.

What I see steemit for more than anything is SEO, it has value as a great SEO tool to utilize for your outside website because I can find lots of my posts on front pages, even lil' ol' me. This means that I can direct people to the actual harder to find locations. And that's great for internet minnows.

Currently, the upvote value is crazy. For a true proof of brain meritocracy we would need everyone's one vote to have the same value. This means that when you like something and upvote it it goes up by maybe $0.01, regardless of how much STEEM you have. Sure, whales would hate this idea, in fact, I would doubt there would be any Steem whales at all, which would be good.

I fully agree with the notion of Resource Credits attached to Steem Power or Steem Mana. I'm all for the idea that if you want a voice on the Steem blockchain, you have to be somewhat invested. This should not be a shyte ton of money, but enough to prop up the network value, cover witness costs (really we should go back to POW and never have left).

Steem needs another hard fork, a fairness and equality oriented hard fork. Whales should not be able to downvote people into invisibility, that's censorship, not community censorship, oligarchy-based censorship.

Whales should have incentives I suppose, but not upvote value incentives, because that leads to minnows staying stuck at the bottom and wealthy getting their messages out while the poor can't earn or be seen. Essentially, Steem reversed all the progress made by the printing press.

I believe in Steem, but it needs a lot of changes.

@hobo.media

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