Steems usd value is going to be driven by the ability to use steempower as a form of marketing to get global reach on the platform. If there's no money in the platform for anybody but the top 1% eventually users will leave for some steem 2.0 clone product and everything we have all built here will be worth nothing.
I'm going to ask you an important question, and you are going to have difficulty answering it, because your essential position is self-contradictory.
Actually, no – I'll give you a break. Let's start with the easy stuff.
You object to the idea that H-dude has received 7% of the reward pool on any given day, and, in theory, he can repeat that effort largely indefinitely. You are outraged that such a thing is possible, and your immediate response is not to improve the position of others by actually improving their position, but to suggest that the most successful people on the platform should be hobbled so that your feelings are less hurt.
Look, I'm not saying that H-dudes content is worth urinating upwind, but I am going to point out that your essential summary in your penultimate paragraph conflicts with everything that went before it. It aggressively subverts your own point.
You cannot simultaneously tell me that you want people to be able to use steem power as a form of marketing to get global reach on the platform and that H-dude is making too much money because he effectively has a massive amount of SP backing directing rewards from the daily reward pool to him.
Those cannot be simultaneously true. One of them must be false.
Now, for myself, I don't care if you get 7% of the reward pool as long as 7% of the SP which was active on the day in question was actually involved in upvoting him. That SP is the underlying influence that we all accept drives importance on this platform, and we accept it by continuing to use the platform.
You might notice that bloody near everything which involves making a change on the steem blockchain is scaled by SP. This is why everyone who seems to feel their opinion should be listened to, whether it should be or not, chirps on and on about "convert your everything to SP so that you have greater influence on the platform!"
So H-dude has people who have done just that voting him up, and as a direct consequence he receives large awards from the reward pool.
So here's the question I would put to you:
Exactly whose influence/votes should be considered less important than yours?
That's what we're talking about, here. We're not talking about allocation from the reward pool, not really. It's an easy line to say, but it's not real. We're not even talking about saying "he's making too much money!" Because if we did that, we would have to actually ask who gets to decide, and if they decide anyone more than they is making too much money – and they will, because they are human – why would you be ultimately immune to that sort of attack, either?
No, you posit a far more insidious problem: "some people's opinion matters too much."
That's what you're really saying. You are saying that the people who have accumulated more SP then you, and way more SP than me, can decide things that you have no say in – like how much of the reward pool that H-dude gets, and you don't like it.
I don't particularly like it, but I remember something that my father once told me that is applicable here.
"Life sucks, and then you die."
The problem that we have is that if your view of economic reality is the dominant one, we essentially just make it not worth the effort for investors - or even active members of the community - to bother trying to be in the top 100, top 1000, top 10,000... Where does it stop?
If you want investment in the platform, if you want people to think of SP as a form of marketing to get global reach of the platform, then you have to accept that they do so with the intent of being able to use that SP. And they will use that SP. They will use that SP to direct a portion of the daily rewards pool to themselves – because that's what the system is designed to do, from the ground up, and forevermore. That's what it does. That's what it knows. That's all that it knows.
This may come as some surprise to you, but the vast majority of SP is controlled by a very tiny percentage of the user base – and if they coordinated to any significant degree, they would and could (and do) direct the vast majority of the rewards pool wherever they like, with no input or even possible input from you and I.
But they literally paid for that privilege.
Now I understand that macroeconomics is not something that people pay attention to in any significant way anymore, so I don't hold this against you as a person, and understanding second-order effects is something that I normally expect from fellow game enthusiasts and designers – and not recognizing those is something that I hold against you as a person just a little bit.
But your understanding of the system and your proposed approaches to solving "the problem" are effective at both disenfranchisement and destroying exactly what you say that you want. That's pretty impressive. You have to go a long way to shoot yourself in the foot and higher along the leg at the same time.
There are 10,000 problems on both the steem blockchain and Steemit which are magnificently huge and will inevitably lead to a rival service providing more consistent rewards to content creators taking most of the Steemit user base. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow – but inevitably.
But that problem is not "some people make more than I think they should." That problem is not "these people paid for the privilege of having more say than I do." That problem is not best addressed by setting yourself as arbiter of what "too much" is, and it's not addressed at all by failing to understand what the prime mover on the blockchain is.
(I'm far more concerned that crappy content generating bots that use terrible Markov chains make more money than I do on a regular basis, but not enough to violate one of the central axioms of the system – that you should be able to have control of the system in proportion to your stake in the system. Not your emotional stake, your fiscal stake.
To me, it's far more disturbing that is getting involved with picking winners and losers on the blockchain by means of directly keeping individuals from earning rather than supporting content that is a good, that is meaningful, that is good for the blockchain. Voting down H-dude doesn't actually help the blockchain. At best, it keeps parity. Far better to reward content that is good, making it more visible, making it represent what the blockchain is capable of creating. Down votes are dumb, triply so in this context. They serve no good purpose.)
RE: Steemit Witness solution for overly successful users like Haejin