Thank you aghunter I have been here less than a week and your post series hit home in many places. I came with intentions of staying for the long haul but was hoping it would be more rewarding at first. I was lurking around a couple of weeks waiting for my account to make it to the front of the line. I ran across similar concerns scattered here and there in various posts over the past few weeks. It concerned me somewhat but hey why not give it a shot.
Each time I ran across the problem my thoughts are that we are dealing with human nature not the blockchain in this instance. What can be done will be done I think everyone could agree. There has to be trust that the whales will see their best interest as staying keeping it going for their investment and not decide to just cut and run to the next promising ICO. That is a very precarious balance to try to support.
After I realized a plankton has it even worse than a minnow lol I decided to try some Curation rewards. Hey at least I can help the platform that way and make a few sp to invest to grow. Well that didn't take long to realize I may be helping the platform and some other Steemians but clearly wasn't going to be helping my goal. The thought came to me that it would seem to be a fairly simple solution to just set a fee for everyone. A percent of their account value (the same percent for everyone) and toss it in a minnow reward fund. I was having some success hitting some curation but it all gets rounded down to nothing I think still not totally sure. Trying to curate gave me the thought that at least I was seeing and following what others were curating to help me evaluate the value of content. So not a waste of time for sure just different rewards.
I would have been happy to have some dust accumulating feeling I at least was growing with my work to help find quality content like I thought this place was supposed to work. Why not let the minnows have the dust they scrape up through a fee system that would distribute enough to each curator to make a penny or two for their efforts. They could then start accumulating so they can buy vote boost like everyone else does. Maybe level the playing field somewhat giving much-needed first encouragement and success even at a limited scale. Then as you grow your fee contributes back to the minnow pool which enables even more to participate growing the membership base.
In essence the more successful you are the more you help the newcomers who really need it. Word spreads that you can actually be rewarded even a tiny amount means a lot to many, many people you wish to attract from around the globe. What a great opportunity to help perhaps millions in impoverished regions where $1 really means something. I realize my thoughts are likely those of protozoa and there is much I don't understand but I think if somehow the blockchain could redistribute even a tiny % of a posts rewards to everyone who was involved in curating the post, that would feed the incentive to sign up and add much value to the blockchain and therefore the whales investments. Seems like a win win for both sides to me.