I believe you are mistaken to assume that democracy is necessarily a good outcome for the platform. Why would you think one person and one vote is the right answer for a commercial enterprise?
Some folks have literally invested many millions of $$ and some people have invested nothing - other than perhaps some time to write a few posts.
I'm just a minnow. I've only been on the platform for two weeks. But I realize I don't have any right or even any reasonable expectation that my vote should count the same as someone that has been here for a year or longer and/or has millions of $$ invested.
In my opinion, expecting one person one vote for a commercial enterprise is naive, and would in fact produce a very bad outcome for STEEM.
I have much more confidence in current mode of operation where whales opinions count more, we know who the whales are, and the path to grow from minnow to whale is reasonably well defined. There are in fact multiple ways to grow from minnow to whale. If you are not a whale, that just means you haven't followed one of the paths to get there - so you don't deserve to be a whale. Yet.
I'd bail out if this platform was really one person one vote, without regard to time, effort and total effective $$ that each individual has invested in the platform.
STEEM On !!
Dave
I never said whales are by definition all what is wrong with the platform, but you can't deny the fact that their power is what currently steers the platform, they decide who gets rewarded and noticed. Yes they should probably have a bigger say for investing/spending time but how big should this scale be? I never said giving everyone the same vote would be the ultimate solution. Maybe a mix from things like SP, amount of votes and reputation. Maybe something entirely different, but seeing how some get huge rewards for little efforts just because they are continiously backed up by a rich guy, isn't that what brings forth wrong motivations? Like the example I made with a government, if some gov decides to use Steemit as a propaganda tool it would be quite affordable with just an investment of a few million dollars.