This is awesome! I'm going to save this to play around with later for sure.
I have a question that is of a slightly different nature. We don't know what half of those SP dumps are doing, but we do have analysis for active flag behaviors and analysis of abuse. If we focus on these, do they have the SP to do whatever they want or not? My impression was that it wouldn't be hard to have a giant group of people band together against these actors, but that graph you showed is a bit discouraging. However, we might want to throw out much more from that top X list.
And I assume that the whales aren't all banding together to assert their rule either. Or we really would be screwed. If that becomes the conclusion, we could be in deep trouble :). If even some whales fight against this rule there is hope I suppose.
That's why I tried to include all of the bits of code that I was leveraging and methodologies. I've heard rumors that such behavior is called "science," but I couldn't testify to that fact for sure.
First of all we would have to reliably be able to define "abuse." I'm not sure that we have a good enough definition or assessment of abusive behavior to be able to programmatically determine whether a given act or operation on the blockchain is abuse.
I recognize that giving voice to such things is pretty heretical at core because the base assumption is that abuse is obvious, omnipresent, and easily denoted. In practice – well, it generally comes down to "someone is doing something I don't like or disagree with so they should stop." For obvious reasons that's not a position I can either support or programmatically ferret out, despite my inclinations.
However – your question is really not about abuse at all. It's about concentration of force, and by force in this context I literally mean vests.
Examine the data that I displayed for various decapitation levels of the list. The curve is self similar even as you take off more and more of the top end. The slope becomes less in absolute terms but remains largely the same in relative terms.
Which bodes ill for the idea that a giant group of people could band together against those actors because it would take way more people as you move down the curve – and as we all know, trying to get people on Steemit to agree to act in the same way at the same time is worse than herding cats. I know cats like food. Users on Steemit can't be reliably expected to choose between multiple acts which reward them in ways that I want them to compared to ways that I don't.
Coordinating those kinds of actions is inherently difficult, maybe impossible. Looking at the reports from even relatively well organized groups like @steemcleaners , the best, most powerful they've ever been able to be has only affected around 6% of the reward pool. And that not consistently.
To put it gently, 6% ain't shit. I think I require that phrasing to really emphasize how nothing that is in the greater scheme.
As I've said elsewhere, the best thing for the community is that if you took every whale and laid them end to end, they'd all point in different directions.
In a real sense, the only person who can oppose a whale is a whale of the same relative magnitude – and even the whales are vastly different in power even in the top 78. The best thing we can hope for is that they continue to pursue their individual best interests and find the idea of coordination in a long-term sense to be counter indicated. And it would be, frankly.
About getting people to act together, I'm not so sure. I find all these organized groups to be pretty promising already, even if we're not at the level of being able to chip at high power folks
But you're right, it's not likely to happen. And you did mention the pointing directions thing and didn't realize for some reason you were talking about it.
Insightful as usual. Cheers.
I'm less sanguine, if only because I tend to immediately recognize that any weapon that can be forged by me can be used against me.
Organized groups of people running around engaged in mass vigilante justice? How can that possibly go wrong?
We don't really need to ask that question since we are currently living through the beginnings of the Age of Warlords on Steemit. Bernie Sanders, H-dude, they are representative figures around which mobs can condense and go to war against one another.
We can see how that turns out. Or rather, we will see. Right now, from ground level, it's kind of a mess and doesn't really have any promise of getting better.
Since I am a cynic, my level of belief in the essential goodness of human nature is pretty taxed in general. The things that give me the most hope our those which seem to disturb others: that very few people care about what I do and what other people do, that there is still some social friction which keeps mass movements from spontaneously forming and lynching me, and that the human resistance to being organized externally and for equal powers to innately oppose one another helps protect me against them.
You have to go for what happiness you can find in life.