I agree that the minnows/whales concept is counterproductive in the sense that it does not incentivize people to vote for quality content, but rather to chase whatever the whales are posting and upvote just to get a piece of that pie whether the posts really deserve it or not. In my opinion, everyone's vote should carry the same weight. Just because someone has been on Steemit a long time or because they've perhaps purchased a lot of Steem doesn't mean they are more qualified to judge quality content nor are they more deserving of higher payouts just because of that. This is more of an oligarchy, rather than the true meritocracy that Steemit should be, as you pointed out.
A major appeal of Steemit is the lack, or at least theoretical lack, of censorship. Ideally this will be a platform where people can freely share ideas without fear of oppression. Yet this is a double-edged sword of course in that it can also result in a deluge of poor quality, trashy posts clogging the feeds. The NSFW, tagging and flagging system is supposed to help control that to a degree, but I think finding a way to give us more control over our own personal feeds would be helpful, especially since people do not always tag appropriately. If spam/trash posters know they can garner even a few extra votes by not appropriately tagging their posts, then they'll post anyway, which means the rest of us have to play policeman. Ugh!
Aside from that, and just thinking off the top of my head here, I'd really like a feature that would let me choose a 'top 20 or top 50 list of people I'm following so that I would be sure to always see their posts in my feed. This would help build community and encourage active support.
I agree with your suggestions @eyeofthestorm ..... we need a model were we are all the ocean rather than individual big fish! The essence of Blockchain. A holarchy rather than heirarchy I must admit that I thought that was how Steemit operated until quite recently I hadn't used my account much and only knew of whales from other areas of the crypto space. Voting should be equal for all otherwise its a copy of Hillary Clintons 'superdelegates' .... The system seems unfair on the whales themselves too as I wouldn't like being constantly harrassed by new users to upvote content I had no connection with, I'd much rather look for subjects that interest me organically. A tiered system may be a good idea where we all have a whale vote say 100% , a dolphin vote 75%, Minnow vote 50% and so can grade content we like by how high a percentage we reward them. Im in unchartered waters here as I'm no expert but there seems to be room for suggestion.
I really like your tiered system idea!
You also make a good point in that, even though whales benefit financially from the current setup, the downside is that people are chasing after them just for their status. Who wants to be 'loved' just for the money?
Yes these Steemit users are "Whale Hunters" 😂 or maybe "Captain Ahabs" is a better term .... How to stop Whale hunting? Well make the Whale blubber a much less profitable resource of course!
@eyeofthestorm I love the idea of a top 20/50 especially when you follow a lot of people. Although I would hate to miss certain posts who may not make the cut.
I already feel bad as I post, comment and reply so much that I'm missing great posts from people I like.
The discord app is a great way to pm your posts to like minded individuals to ensure their stuff is not missed. I do this currently with a number of peope.
Thanks for the comment dude.
@tremendospercy
It is hard to keep up already and I have less than 500 followers. I guess it's encouraging in a way and reflects well on Steemit so far if we feel like there are too many good posts for us to even get to.
I'll look into the Discord app. Many thanks.