People like to take shots at the whales on here and complain that the system is unfair. It appears that many feel that they are "entitled" to enormous rewards in their first post or two. Few take the time to think about what others are doing, or have done, to push this ecosystem forward. Instead, they start to whine how the reward system is unfair.
Of course, many of us who are on here only add fuel to the fire by stating the same thing. We see someone hit the trending page for saying good night while we work an hour on an article that gets 50 cents. That can be very frustrating to say the least. Often, we follow this by posting a comment or writing an article stating exactly how we feel. This, in turn, gets read by our newcomers who have the idea planted in their heads before they even get started.
So I decided to do a bit of research to determine what is going on and I will state this emphatically:
THE CURATION/REWARD SYSTEM IS NOT BROKEN: IT IS WORKING EXACTLY AS INTENDED
The rich on here are not getting richer, at least proportionally speaking. Those at the whale level are not taking an unfair percentage of the reward pool. They are not increasing their holdings over everyone else. None of this is true and is total mythology.
In fact, the numbers tell us the exact opposite is happening. The whales are losing ground in terms of their holdings of steem (SP) compared to the rest of us. I will state if the banking-run world worked this well, most of humanity would be living the high life instead of struggling to make ends meet.
I started this process by reading an article that was written last year:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@hisnameisolllie/the-top-1-steem-v-the-real-world
Since this article was written, the distribution of STEEM has gotten more equal and will continue to do so. However, let's look at a couple of points.
From the article:
Top 1%: 88.3%
1%-10%: 10.67%
Bottom 90%: 1.03%
Well that pretty much blows. It is obvious you have a situation where the STEEM wealth is in the hands of a select few. I think this fact cannot be argued.
However, let us look at things today. This came from https://steemwhales.com/.
Top 1%: 80.45%
1%-10%: 13.99%
Bottom 90%: 5.56%
Can you imagine if this happened in the banker-run world? The top 1% went from over 88% of the wealth to close to 80%. The 1%-10% class did rather well but it is the bottom 90% who made the biggest gain going from 1% of the pie to 5.5% (and a much bigger pie too).
So what caused this? There were a number of factors I am sure. Last year, 
These results suggest to me that, the dilution rate (being experienced by the top 1%) is likely much lower than the 7.725% I previously extrapolated, however most accounts I looked at were well below the 10.30% limit, and on average I would suggest that dilution is closer to the 3% mark… This I believe shows the inefficiency of the Steemit community (being currently too small) to nullify the 'Whales' power of attraction (especially the Bot accounts). As the user base gets larger, we will see this dilution rate tend to 7.725% over time. A larger user base will breed efficiency.
What is ironic is his conclusion was off a bit. His original analysis of the whales being diluted the 7.75% was close to accurate. He predicted in a year that the 1% group would be diluted to 81.47% (not too far off from the 80.45 today). Of course, the article date is last year, so we might be dealing with 14 or 16 months. Nevertheless, the top 1% holds a smaller piece of the pie than they did.
The key to all this is the fact that everyone is limited to 20% of their voting power daily. Nobody can exceed that and have it replenished without it taking more than 24 hours. This means that, unless someone is upvoting oneself exclusively which I have yet to see any whale do, there is a loss of 25% on those votes that are spread around to others. Of course, this situation is further enhanced if the whale does not use his or her daily allotment. This puts more in the reward pool for those that are.
And that is the second key. Upvoting your daily allotment is critical. That is what causes the transfer of wealth and changes these percentages. In fact, if 100,000 minnows increased their accounts by just 20 SP, that would result a shift in 1% of the overall wealth to them. The bottom 90% would jump to 6.5% (all other things being equal). How hard is it to take an account to 20 SP? Even one just opened could do that in the first month if that person actually took the time to post, comment, and upvote.
There you have it. The system was designed to reward those people who post, upvote, and comment. As we can see, overall, this is working. While there might be some issues when we scale down to the individual level, these numbers show that in spite of bots, circle voting, and whatever other games that are being played, the system is doing what it intended. This process surely is being helped along by those whales who are delegating SP to others who are contributing. Nevertheless, as more people join and get active, the amount of wealth the top 1% has as a percentage of the whole is going to go down.
Thus, my conclusion is to stop the calls to change the curation system. Why fix what is not broken?
Remember this article the next you want to lash out how unfair this system is and ask yourself "do I use my alloted 20% of voting power today?". From what I can gather, that is one of the major keys.
If you found this article helpful and informative, please give it an upvote and a re-steem.
Pictures by Google Images.