Sure we had all that. Nobody's claiming we didn't. Long term, those guys would need to cash out to lock in any gains.
That cashing out meant selling steem to newcomers like myself; each new hodler chipping away at the cabal's dominance of the pool.
I had an $80 post when I was a penniless noob with a month's experience and 25 followers. Whales were actively looking for great new authors; to upvote them for those fat curation rewards.
Now I'm an orca with 3500 followers and haven't seen that kind of payout in over a year.
Which one is going to attract and retain the best contributors?
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You're an orca. And as far as I'm concerned, deservedly so. I don't remember seeing your name amongst the "trending groups" back in the beginning. My guess is you got to where you are by hard graft and investment, whilst believing in the platform enough to keep it safely stashed in your wallet. Awesome! I've led a similar path so far.
But my only point is, confined to the context of quality, I reckon the same phenomena may reoccur once more if the current model is changed back to n2. In the past we had "in-crowd upvoting", today we got "bidbots". The outcomes of both are not too far off each other from what I've witnessed up until now. I mean in terms of climbing up the trending page via some form of skewed bias. Organic equality-based trending was a difficult feature to implement or even quantify within the history of Steemit.
But hey, these are all simply speculative opinions, right? Let's see how this and everything else plays out, man. :)
Long term I can see the current arrangement yielding similar results, but its the ugly road, through a swamp.
We should definitely stay on it now; let SMTs give us a playground to trial all sorts of concepts.