RE: Does anyone else feel like the whales have become a bit too…powerful?
Who ever created this space we call reality didn't have equality of outcome in mind. Everything is distributed followed the 80/20 principle. 20% of the leaf on the tree gathers 80% of the sunlight. We wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time, etc. (it even goes to 95/5 and 99/1 because it's fractal in nature)
So having a 2% to 5% of users that own 80% of the stake is something completely natural and any attempt to remedy that will turn to failure. The good thing is that steemit reshuffles through authors contribution and give great mobility upward to everyone who's willing to play the game. The more users join, the more users will become whales and eventually reach more maturity.
The best to make it more diverse is to increase the amount of users and few will rise to the top via their contribution. (some may also buy that status)
20% of the users of Steem tend to analyze it too much, while the other 80% of us simply enjoy the experience. :)
lol
I've been wrestling a bit with the concepts mentioned in this post as well (thanks @nomoreheroes7!), and I think you just nailed the answer. The 80/20 rule. That makes sense to me.
As for this comment:
Is that possible if the interest rates enjoyed by the whales today completely outpaces what's possible for new users to earn in a reasonable amount of time? What we might consider a whale tomorrow could be massively dwarfed by a super whale built up by interest on a whale's account today.
Man, I just need to pause a second and saw how freaking amazing it is that this community is, in essence, participating in real-time experimentation in free economic systems in open transparency. Anyone can take it over leave it without coercion. That's... amazing. :)