Ok, I will concede a lot of your points. Valid feedback. Thats why the title and summary said "let's talk about it!"
But "And telling them they're powerless might contribute to this." Is kind of just speaking to the stake issue and the RC issue both. The truth is, even if I somehow corralled a couple thousand minnows in a group, we likely couldn't move a witness one spot in either direction, or direct curation rewards at all, if all our rewards are 0.00 per vote.
Thats what I meant by powerless.
True, but it's not viable to give anyone a voice even if they're not invested. That's a systemic issue without any viable workaround.
It's not too hard to get the vote value above nothing, and if minnows would vote more of their own they could build themselves up. The interfaces dont help with that though.
Trying to do my part with curangel.
So in a vacuum, if if a zero day minnow votes on other zero day minnows and their votes are worth 0.00 to each other, somehow they eventually build up some mass? Am I misunderstanding the value of votes as to how they work with the distribution of the pool? Because with enough larger voters also weighing in throughout the ecosystem, aren't those actual pool rewards consumed accordingly in a weighted ratio such that the zeros remain zero?
If you have the moment, link me to a better guide or educate me in a few words. it would benefit us all to understand the rewards distribution better, I'm quite certain.
No, 0 is 0. But there are a few who upvote minnows, and often the introduceyourself post gets them above 0 already. I know quite a few people who started with nothing and worked their way up to dolphin status. They need to stick around and grow their account though. Can't expect to join, not invest, and immediately have influence.
I do recall on steem that the Intro yourself thing was everyone's first stop, both to post and to do some daily reading. Since the advent of hive and the communities break outs, I haven't seen an intro yourself post in a longgg time when I have checked back around here. And definitely none in any trending columns. Which is where I'd expect them to land if somebody really awesome showed up here. But this brings us back to what would compel somebody really awesome to show up here? Whats our value prop really come to, if its not merit?
Do you expect a Mr Beast, a Neil deGrasse Tyson, or a Taylor Swift to appear on Hive? Yes yes, extreme examples to make a point, but B-grade examples exist aplenty and they don't even know we exist.
Which was my last point. GOOD ideas don't NEED marketing.... Ever seen a commercial or ad for twitter or youtube? Their value prop is very clear. get an audience. Get paid. And they were tiny once too, so we can't blame it on being "new" as a platform either, we're half those systems age here overall. (aside from the forkening, steem/hive blur together enough to fit this context)
Because if we really had a value prop, we'd have the audience and they'd want to be in front of it. But the value prop being pitched doesn't match the experience upon arrival.
I dunno man, maybe I'm not as articulate about this as I could be. But something ain't right.
And that's the hard part, everywhere. Audiences aren't easily transfered between those platforms either. Someone can be successful on YouTube, but not on Instagram. All depends on the effort they put into those platforms.
As long as that effort produces some kind of results, to be specific :) Which brings us back to:
It took Mr. Beast 5 years of work to land his first viral video. If you're active on hive since 5 years, you definitely have a considerable stake by now.
@pharesim is not wrong here. Just like with any other social, if there is any proof of work at all, it takes time and effort and work to "invest" stake. And it is possible. And it would be imbalanced if newbies got freebies. But you are right, there needs to be a little bit more in the way of RC and voting status when you start. Zero is ineffective and a deterrent.
One thing the TT is doing right is EVERYONE gets voting status when you start. You get access to 300 "friends" as it were with every single post. Friends vote you up based on metrics such as "likes," "duration," "comments," and so forth.
Perhaps trying an algorithm that caters FYP feeds based on keywords rather than follows would be a good start.