What happens when your philosophy doesn't match reality? What happens when you have ideals that fundamentally goes against basic fundamental laws of the universe?
To put it shortly, those people set themselves up for a big disappointment.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens in 99% of the post that complains about the whales or the distribution of stakes within Steem.
They stem from people not being aware of a force at work, a law, a principle that arise wherever we deal with physical reality...
The Pareto Principle / The Vital Few and Trivial Many
Whether you believe in God or not. Who or Whatever set the rules of the game we call reality didn't have even distribution in mind. Quite on the contrary. EVERYTHING is distributed unevenly, and the ratio seems to be somewhat constant. Very Few Factors Are Responsible For The Majority of The Results.
Not only that but it's fractal! There is another 80/20 within the 80/20 (95/5 and finally 99/1).
NOTE: 80/20 is an expression. It's everything between 80/20 to 99/1.
Here are some examples:
- 80% of the traffic happens on 20% of the roads
- 80% of beer is drank by 20% of beer drinkers
- People wear 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time
- 80% of sales come from 20% of your clients
- 20% of the leaf on a tree get 80% of the sunshine
The list goes on and on. No matter how much you hate this fact...its a fact. Nothing will change this. Its "hard-coded" in the very fabric of reality.
The 80/20 Rules applies to Steemit too
For the second, let's exclude the newbies who probably just came in, have no clue how to make a proper post or didn't get a blogpost to earn any rewards for a number of factors. Let's start from the people who's earned enough to be called "users"
I'm sure if we keep drilling down, we will find another 80/20 in the 80/20 and so on. (between super-users and legend for example)
How terribly Unfair!
Yes indeed. It's "unfair". But is it "just"? I let you decide on that one.
I've been here for 2 months and that may give you a little perspective...
The stake % in each category didn't change much and the pareto principle teaches us that it will likely never change or very little. What has changed is the number of accounts in each category!
If the number of users in the upper category didn't change, I would agree that it would be alarming. But as far as I was able to observe the upward mobility up the food chain is staggering.
Now you may cry, moan, ring your hands in the air...that won't change a thing.
Best course of action for each person
NOW that you know the setup and how it's going to be, you can align your actions with it. You can learn to optimize your post for payout, start bringing value to the community via software development, network with the whales and bring them value, start a witness campaign, etc.
You ain't going to get a communist utopia here were everyone are equal in results. If that's what you want, you are just in the wrong place. What we are given here is an opportunity to bring value, use our skills and ability to play the game and be rewarded for it. Some will generate huge amount of results while many will generate very few.
Pareto Principle Is Brutal and We Are More Than That
I admit, the Pareto Principle is brutal and it is not the "be all and end all" of reality. We are human with an innate sense of ethics and morality based on equality in our humanity.
So if you care about the poor, the sick and the elderly please sharpen your skills here to be in a position to help those people in any way that you see fit and appropriate. But please, don't lobby to change the algorithm to make it more equal...you will only kill the goose that lays the golden egg.