Let me be clear that I'm not bashing the vast majority of steemians as a whole. I completely agree that there are a whole lot of great people on the platform, and for those who are finding success as newcomers I am both encouraged and encouraging. My wife (@byn), for instance, is doing remarkably well here. Of course, she's quite extraordinary (all personal bias aside) :)
Where you and I disagree is regarding your point that you cannot make a system which isn't broken until you fix the underlying cultural and societal issues. I understand what you're getting at, and I agree that the inherent nature of humans will always lead some to seek out gain well beyond their peers. However, steemit as a platform could easily be modified to at least mitigate the impact that the top 1% is currently having in terms of presenting a barrier to entry for newcomers to the model.
I wouldn't want to - as you put it - 'essentially steal from [established accounts]'. I do understand that they've put in the time and effort, and that simply by being early adopters they profited disproportionately to what anyone coming to the platform today could reasonably expect to gain in the same amount of time. The same thing is true of any crypto. I tend to think of posting here on steemit as effectively running a mining rig for STEEM. Instead of a PoW mining concept, STEEM is just using a PoC (Proof of Content) model instead. By getting in early when the mining difficulty was very, very low they were able to mine huge amounts using very little in terms of resources. They deserve those gains just as much as someone who set up a BTC mining rig in 2010. The place where this analogy runs dry though, is that someone who mined a whole bunch of BTC early on doesn't have an unfair advantage at mining additional BTC today, which is very much the case with STEEM.
That leads me to an interesting thought in terms of how to express what I'm trying to get at. In my above post I called it a 'reset'. It may be more appropriate to term it a 'difficulty adjustment' that is applied relative to the age of the steem that you 'mined.' Some sort of algorithm that essentially weakens the influence a unit of steem power can have over time without devaluing the actual underlying STEEM.
I don’t know how much we disagree really, I don’t find many problems with what you say, I’m just trying to share my perspective. I also want some changes in the algorithm, but what I mean is, a change in the culture would mean a clearer idea and agreement of what we want steemit to be, how we can accomplish that and coming together to pressure the witnesses (some of which may not even need pressure if they feel it’s what the community wants, @timcliff comes to mind) to make changes that would help the distribution of wealth. Rather than jut focusing on the negative, try to make a proposal. If it sound a good, I’ll share it. If it’s good enough, I’ll send it to all the whales I know and mention it in my circles.
One of the changes in culture that I propose though is less focus on what someone “deserves” because this is where people always end up arguing and it’s all subjective and based on personalities beliefs. We all deserve more, especially those of us who struggle, no one really “deserves” less unless they don’t care about others, but even that is a subjective call.
Your idea sounds great to me, is it realistic? I have no idea but you should talk to people in the chats about it and see if anyone bites. There are a few witnesses who hang out in #general.
I've not been involved in any of the chats to date. To be honest, I don't even now where to find them :) What chats are you using?
We have a chat called be awesome, linked in most of my posts. We are all small fish though. If you want to talk to the big fish, steemit.chat or do a search for the steemspeak discord channel. There are about 4 or 5 whales that Hangout in each but you need to hang around and meet a few people first otherwise they’ll just blow you off cause there are a billion minnows who think they’ve been wrong and wanna complain :-P