I don't like the focus on big stakeholders when there are proposals like PeakD that get to the top without any big stakeholder voting. Orcas matter more than whales, you make it seem like hive is centralized.
Empirically, you can simply look at the total hibe powered up and see that the percentage stake in few hands should not matter.
The real problem is that most people don't take the time to review proposals. So although they can make a difference, they are not active.
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What is your cut off of consideration of a "large" stakeholder? I'd personally consider Orcas to be 100K of their own stake. Where as an Elite is over a million or considerably (> 10x) more in the case of the most upper echelon of top tier.
A lot of the stake we see voting is delegated by these Elite / Upper Echelons. Another thing to note is that the stake being used in your example are almost entirely supplied by the largest of stakeholders to those propping the peakd.com proposal up. It is basically only by the will of the top tiers we see that possible. If we were to, lets say, see a network wide retracement of all delegation we'd see some serious shifts and a more clear gaze upon the leaps and bounds influence wise the community is behind the tops.
You're not wrong in saying the Orca is incredibly important. But when you need something like 100 Orca to make up a single Elite class and we've only got a couple thousand active users... You begin to see the issue emerge.
Most people don't even have a clue what is going on under the hood. Nor should they honestly be expected to. However in saying that you also see that people not being aware contributes to this and magnifies the stake distribution disparity even further.
I realize to some calling this sort of thing out is viewed as wealth or stake shaming, but that isn't my intention at all, with that falling somewhere between wanting large stake holders to take more consideration for their choices or actions and trying to loosen what effectively is a death grip around the way things are run here's neck we potentially see now.