I wasn't responsible for designing Hive's "influence based on staking power", so I don't particularly feel compelled to defend it. It has some obvious weaknesses, but in the end I'm quite certain that Hive is still a much more decentralized solution than existing social media. It's not a trivial thing to fix the influence, because this design decision is baked into Hive at the core.
It is my plan to create a solution to the problems caused by wealth-based influence, but my plan for that will likely take a couple of years in the best case. I mentioned some details about this plan a long time ago in two posts and the ideas behind it have been under development for almost two years now. But even the design isn't yet finished, and we probably won't start coding of the actual software until next year.
As to my voting down of some high-reputation accounts, I do it to fix what I believe is a problem with the existing reputation system: it doesn't allow lower reputation accounts to lower the reputation of higher ones. So in the case of a few accounts that got high reputations from repeated voting by a few high staked accounts in the distant past, those reputations can't be lowered by anyone except an account with a very high reputation. For this reason, sometimes people contact me and ask me to help them downvote temporarily. This doesn't happen often, it's happened in two cases to my recollection: RT and world-travel-pro. There may have been one or two others in the past, but if so I can't recall.
I continue to downvote RT because I truly view them as a source of disinformation and I don't mind it being known.
To answer your final question, Hive is decentralized as a source of information.
But as to distribution of influence, its core design is staked-based influence, not democratic-based influence. This doesn't mean the system isn't decentralized, but it isn't particularly democratic. Nonetheless, anyone can continue to post whatever they want here, despite the opposition of "whale" token holders. The same cannot be said of centralized social media platforms.
Stake-based influence was probably an easy choice for Hive's design, because it matched the goal of the original coders to create a token that gave people influence by purchasing it, giving the token a tangible source of value, and equally important from a design perspective, it doesn't require the software to distinguish who are real people and who are bots.
Good to read that there is some plan to reduce influence of staked power; as the implementation naturally will take a long time, it would be even better if you already followed the idea with your personal DV-policy. I'll say it once (again) and then leave you to it:
(personally I can't fathom why you would do that in case of Hivewatchers).
If the few in power would respect those two points, Hive might be a much nicer place.
So the general drift I got out of this conversation:
You obviously play the long game, no quick 'mass adoption' or significantly expanding of the userbase. You rather take the time that it takes to work on a more fair and solid structure. If that's what it is, I am all for it, and even though I am kind of fading out of Hive, this makes me curious enough to check in again in a few years.
Thanks again for taking the time and shedding some light into that corner of Hive. I might direct some of the critical crowd to this comments as I think it quite a rare gem!