Ha! Well, I am almost too tired to write about it, but here's my thoughts on the subject.
Steemit was a flawed experiment from the very beginning. The biggest mistake was that it never defined what it was supposed to be. A blogging platform like Medium, a news board like Reddit, a social media like Facebook, a micro blogging platform like twitter. Ned and Dan are no doubt crafty businessmen and engineers, but they don't know shit about entertainment. Problem is that the entertainment industry don't know about entertainment any longer either.
Facebook is the most clever business model for decades - the idea was that you produce an empty frame and let people entertain themselves and each other with home made kitsch, political opinions and kittens. You then abuse everybody's privacy and make money selling everybody's asses. This idea was what attracted the founding fathers of this mess. They just didn't have any idea how to present an understandable format and they hadn't any plan on how to directly capitalise on this place. Growth should create value, but they should have looked further into what it was Facebook and Google did when they had grown. They made it into an advertising machine that is right now destroying large part of the old news and entertainment industry.
Steemit had some fine ideas like getting money back to the people and little businesses like ours. But as the whole thing was based on some lofty libertarianism that doesn't work in the real world it was (of course) destined to run into troubles. And troubles there was.
Vote buying, circle-jerking, plagiarism, self voting etc. There's one name for it: corruption. Having no centralised way to deal with these things, the community came up with their own institutions and many, among them me, have been working tirelessly to stop the corruption since 2016. But for all the frontier spirit there still isn't backup in the system for these efforts. And that is the problem we are facing. I am not sure how the perfect system is accomplished, but I know that it will come by through trial and error and not by ideology. I see Hive as an opportunity to actually do something about it, because Steemit inc, the semi-abusive company behind isn't in charge any more. It will have to be done by you and me and the rest of the people here who actually cares.
So ask yourself this very important question:
Who are you talking to in your post? Whales is pretty vague. I have a general impression of many of them as being OK people, who like you see things from a very personal angle. Why should they help out with creating a place where quality content is rewarded. Why should they stop self voting, voting for their friends or people they fell good about etc. ??
As my project (which is only part of what I do for a living) is about ditching editors, art dealers, music distributors, media and all the rest of the people who took advantage of me and my fellow artist before Facebook destroyed them all, I just know that we have to organise this ourself. This is not Twitter or Facebook. This is a prospector town where you have to build the water supply, the poorhouse, the theater and the police station. Gangs of criminals will inevitably try to take control, that is just part of it. And as Steem/Hive is not at all as decentralised as it is made up to be (The miners have a major control of this place) we need to convince them that some sort of fair democracy should be built into the meritocratic system.
In short We need to write a white-paper.
I am not even sure if I can find the time for participating, but that is what has to be done. Both you and I have delivered a lot of quality content, but that doesn't solve the problems of this place, and if we, the middle class of Steemit/Hive does not work to change it there will be no changes...
EDIT: I would have liked to present this in a more orderly fashion, but I hope my thoughts come through. The creative community is definitely being fucked over as usual. Cheers.
You laid out a lot here, and I am hard pressed to disagree with any of it. Every point you're making is spot on. The whales I'm referring to are the people who set the split in motion, advanced it, and/or executed it. Which if they have no plan to grow usership...will in the end amount to a temper tantrum, and another crypto currency that no one gaf about and another social media platform that might as well be a niche message board.
I would wish that the system had another weight between proof of stake and proof of work. I think that is one of the main reasons for a lot of the drama here. Proof of stake are the rich investors, and they have the power... also the power to forge. Proof of work is a good idea but has been treated stepmotherly. Sadly this reflects the real world, doesn't it? The freelancer or little shop will have to follow the prices, the percentage of the large newspapers, editors, distributors etc. An art dealer who split 50-50 with his artists will, if he work for 10 artists, have an income ten times the artists.
Bringing the money is seen as value, the product is downplayed and neglected as a cheap commodity.
I would have liked to see a system where reputation actually meant something. Since Slashdot invented the karma system there has been many tries to value quality, and it can be. The argument that everything is equally good is just so stupid. We humans use a lot of time to evaluate quality in so many things and we have built systems to do the same, like academia. Programmers are just immature when it comes to understanding these things. They have to use a Gauss curve instead of a boolean.