Well captured and succinctly depicted. I could not have articulated it better. I have become a strong follower and support your witness pursuit. I believe you can do it. Steem on. We are all stakeholders in this and I hope that these explanations will help improve the way people vote.
Sincerely, I have come to realize that most of the whales here actually deserve better pay. If you consider all the efforts and sacrifices they have made to the platform then an unbiased recommendation should be for them to remain on top.
I had a discussion with one whale recently who told how he invested when there was no hope that this will be a success. After that discussion, I had a totally different mentality about whales. It is easy to join today and start shouting of marginalization because the soup is fully cooked and ready.
Let us keep appreciating those who was here before us. Someday, we will equally be appreciated by those coming after us.
It is not reasonable to say that people who are marginalized are being unfair to early investors. While those investors certainly deserve kudos for their dedication and hard work making Steemit a place where we can all grow, the present dilemma for new accounts is that they are trying to attract votes and HF19 just decreased votes per post by far more than 400%, since many people are self voting out of desperation.
It's possible that those frustrated new account holders won't last, and if they exit the platform, the price of Steem will decrease, causing those investors we all want to profit handsomely to instead suffer losses.
Since the price of Steem is dependent on Steemit's growth, upvoting new accounts is the best way to put profits in the pockets of those investors. We don't have the votes to do it now. @liberosist has proposed a rational, middle-of-the-way, VP curve that would solve that problem, for now.
It doesn't go far enough, in my mind, because it doesn't free whales from the trap of linking their SP holdings to their VP, causing them to either need to self vote out of fiscal responsibility, or neglect their finances in order to curate as the white paper expected them to.
Additionally, people piling on to posts by authors sure to trend isn't curation. It's pandering, and it's profitable. Valuing votes by when they are cast enables groups to time posts, and time their upvotes, to maximize financial rewards. All of these shenanigans are harmful to Steemit. They are working at cross purposes to the goal of rewarding content creators for the value of the content, and are financial manipulations for profit, which the white paper specifically warns is a hazard to Steemit.
When the price of Steem appreciates, investors accrue handsome rewards, as happened in May. This is a fine way for them to be rewarded for their dedication to the community that has sprung up on top of their effort - unless Steemit starts shedding users, because those users are unable to equally join in the process of growing, and see that it is unfair.
People don't like unfair. Unfair will cost investors money, in the long run, and the difference may be, as we see with BTC, between Steem at $4, or Steem at $4000. What cost self votes then?