The reason there is an issue, is because of rewards, not voting. It's the perceived "unfair reward scheme" associated with voting. That's what bothers people. Get rid of the rewards, and then people having more voting power wouldn't matter very much at all. People have expectations through comparative assessment with others. Then reality doesn't work like their misconception believed, and they get frustrated and leave. It takes time to post and get recognized.
If users took the time to understand how this platform works, then maybe they would stay. I did. I learned how Steemit functioned by going to search and read up on things. People are very lazy in the social media short-attention span field, so that seems like a "demanding" requirement for some. They want to stick to their false implicit correspondence to existing platforms, and assume and expect things to function the same way.
Steemit is something new, and has it's own way of operating. Money changes everything. People who have a stake in shares (SP) have the power. To incentivise holding the token as a share (STEEM->SP), it holds the power in the system. If we created a new rep token, then the investment side and their influence would be greatly affected. That's not good for a monetary model system like Steemit is.
Actually, for those of us who like to read, I'd enjoy finding truly great content that is liked by a lot of people. My tastes may not be the same as the whales, so I have to sift through tons of posts to find good stuff. A few of my finds have made it to the trending page, but the whales are not all so good at finding gems......
Yeah whoops I forgot to add that I agree about the topic, since that's how things work, it is basically the Whale's Picks category, since whale power = trending content. We should at least have an "upvote" section to find upvoted content, that we hope aren't upvoted to shit by bots lol. But at least it would be there to view.
the "most upvoted" category could be messed with by whales like you said. since they could curate an article, then send it to the top, with bots ex: 1000 different accounts, and they would get half of the eventual curation payout, I think how it works. At least we don't have so much of that abuse now, with spam voting.
This was tried. The Hot ranking used to be weighted by votes not SP. It was upvoted to shit by bots.
my point is that there are two mechanisms going on: high SP accounts choosing posts and the masses choosing posts. There are good posts that the whales never find, but that the masses have voted on.
Over time won't the distribution of steem power be better?
maybe but maybe not. It all depends. I doubt the big power holders will give up their power.
If all it took for posts to show up on the trending page was "lots of votes from the masses" you would start to see all the technically smart users create armies of bots and upvote their posts with thousands of votes.
not if you add reputation-weighted voting algorithm.
Reputation is not part of the consensus, though - which means it could potentially be hacked by a malicious miner/witness.
Also, it would not be very hard to boost reputation in order to manipulate votes if it meant it would be used in rewards. (As an example, I believe one upvote from someone like @blocktrades can take a new user from reputation 25 to reputation 50.)
@stellabelle
Yes, that's because there is currently no incentive to mine up the reputation of bots. Change the incentives and you will rapidly see bot armies with higher reps.
but crappy bots usually have a 25 rep score. It's hard to get a big boost in rep score without being active.
That would change very quickly if having a higher reputation score meant you could influence rewards.
true true.