Small downvotes of powerless accounts and retaliation downvotes are a side effect. But those don't matter in the big picture. The small ones don't have an effect
Are you aware what decentralization really means? In a decentralized network is anyone able to run a node at any time and no one has more power than anyone else. Both is not true for Steem. You are just emotionally involved in this system and therefore praise it and put it like it would be decentralized while it is clearly not. You even state it that "smaller" accounts have nothing to say.
The last hardfork even improved the power in the hands of the whales by giving them higher curation and free downvotes. Now the necessary trust towards them is even higher than ever before. Though there is no room for trust in a decentralized network.
Posts like this work on this platform for praising the platform. But outside this filter bubble you would not get any agreements like here. Make a post inside the ethereum subreddit about decentralization and see what you will get there.
If Steem would be decentralized anyone would be able to run a node and all votes would have exactly the same weight. There were no 21 witnesses and of course there would be a problem with people having several accounts but you can not replace this unsolved technical problem with such weird workarounds.
I personally know of >1M STEEM that has been bought since the EIP exactly for the reason that we now have a chance to getting closer to doing so.
This example does not work. Even if you try to look for indications, the question is, how many NEW people bought Steem to become a whale since the hardfork? Whales buying more does not indicate anything since they decided to go this way of improving their situation.
Any related to your image. Getting a big downvote from one group does not represent any kind of majority. It is just a powerful group deciding independently on their own. You just follow the argumentation of someone powerful instead of having a discussion before where the majority made a decision afterwards. This is no decentralization, this is leading and following.
These are just some reasons proven why DPoS is never going to work on the long distance. What do you think why people decide to post on Medium without getting any reward instead of using Steem? They have bigger trust in the centralized administration than in anonymous private persons here.
Decentralized means there is no single point of authority. This is given. The definition doesn't say anything about everyone having exactly the same say. By your definition Bitcoin isn't decentralized, as the biggest miners could change the protocol and everyone else's more would be running on a fork.
Everyone can run a node, everyone can be a witness. Like with every other coin, getting to produce a big amount of blocks requires a big investment.
And people don't become whales over night, or in a month. How many new whales have been created in the months before? That measure is useless.
And for the last part, there are rewards on medium for successful authors.
So a company owned by two or more people is decentralized?
If one pool has > 51%, would people still trust Bitcoin? With Steem being in the hands of 21 witnesses, no one complains, weird.
No one is allowed to complain about politics because anyone can be the next president.
You are going to be a whale within minutens when buying a huge load of Steem.
Why are you asking me? You claimed to personally know people buying so many Steem suddenly.
A company is a single entity of its own. It can be shut down, steem can't.
And there is no way for anyone outside of that entity to have influence on the owners (except for the state). Steem witnesses influence is decided on in a decentralized way, not by appointing themselves.
The only thing you could criticize there is that some shareholders have a bigger saying than others, depending on the size of their stake. But that's 1) unavoidable in a p2p network and 2) understandable, because they have the most to lose when the platform develops in a direction they don't see as desirable.
Why weird? As you say, it's 21 (actually it's a lot more), not one.
Anyone, but not everyone. Nothing holds you back from becoming a witness today.
Yes, people. Not one single person. One of them went from close to 0 to half-whale, but that's the best I can offer so far.
My question was how many did this before the hardfork?
i suggest you, to read something about the "ninja mining" of steem.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.60 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.240
if you use the stake as only parameter to measure vote weight, the ("initial") distribution has to be faire
perhaps mind changing for you:
source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07310.pdf
for me this was kind of mind changing. i dont like dpos anymore
I don't need to read on this, and it won't change my mind, as I was there nearly from the start ;) Which is a proof that it was not as "ninja" as some people like to make it seem. Yes, there were only a few people interested in getting into it, and I do agree with the distribution being one of the big problems we had. It's been improved on a lot though, there are many big holders who got in later.
It's still hard to get into/stay in the top witnesses without massive whale support, and especially one miner account has an unproportionately high say in who's up there. It needs more time and more people interested in investing significantly to fix these issues.