Whales Need Minnows More Than Minnows Need Whales!

TO ALL YOU BIG WHALES OUT THERE, WAAAY UP IN THE CLOUDS

_{A Friendly Reminder! 😊 image source}

Whales Need Minnows Just As Much, If Not More Than Minnows Need Whales!
(A Minnow's Point Of View)

The main reason for this is that Minnows Are The Bedrock of the Steemit Food Chain Pyramid!

Just like in the real world, it is not the Apex Predator species (we Humans, Grizzlies, Killer Whales etc. or some of the other creatures a few rungs below us) that are the most important members of the food chain. It is the exact opposite. It is the bottom members of the food chain that support and keep the whole pyramid alive! Without Plankton, Algae, Fungi, Earthworms, Krill and, yes, Minnows and the like, NONE of us would be here!

Now to backtrack a bit, this post of mine was originally a comment to a suggestion/idea that @timcliff proposed as a way to reduce spam. His original position was that by setting the minimum payout to 1.00 SBD, or even to 0.25 or 0.10 SBD it would take away much if not all of the incentive for spammers to spam. If you're interested, you can read his post here.

My original response to his ideas was that
I Strongly Vote For No Minimum.

Thankfully, some other Whales, like @justtryme9 and @ats-david, as well as many other Steemians, expressed that they too thought a higher minimum payout was a bad idea, especially for us minnows. As well, it also seems clear that, through all the responses to his post @timcliff himself became convinced that raising the minimum payout was not a good idea. In my personal opinion, I firmly believe that the minimum should be lowered from .02 to .01! Or have none at all!

Change like @timcliff suggested might indeed have an effect on reducing spam. However the main and most important effect it would have is to drive away the majority of the ‘food’ source for himself and all the other whales and dolphins on here!

It’s hard enough being a minnow here on Steemit at present. For the majority of us Johnny-come-latelies making any kind of money here on Steemit is a constant uphill grind. For most of us, the majority of our posts and comments see few if any votes and when we do receive them, they’re usually from other minnows without the voting power for their upvotes to be worth much if anything at all. It’s pretty rare that a minnow or newbie has posts or comments that earn over .05 SBD let alone a whole whopping 1SBD! If you take our pennies and crumbs away from us, what point will we have to even be here and spend our precious time creating content and posts that hopefully someone, or, miracle of miracles, a Big Whale will swim along and upvote?

And we all know what happens if Steemit has a large member and participation drop, right? It certainly won’t be much fun, or very profitable, if it's just a handful of big whales and dolphins swimming around circle jerking each other. I mean no offence to anyone by that, I make it colorful just to make a point.

As we all know, Steemit is just in it’s BETA phase and the one of the main points and purposes for most of us here (at least I hope that’s the case) is to help Steemit grow, Massively Grow, it’s user base to the point where there’s Millions or even Billions of people using, enjoying and profiting from creating content on Steemit. If that happens, Whoo-Hoo! We all win! But if all of us new and hardworking minnows no longer have any incentive to be here - Poof! The party ends and it all goes away. For everyone.

Now, I am a newbie and I’m very much still learning my way around here. As well I’m certainly no coder and I don’t consider myself to be a crypto-genius by any stretch of the imagination. However because it’s a big pet peeve of mine when people complain about an issue without offering any potential solutions to it, I’ll give it a whack and suggest a few things I think might help combat Spam. I’m just spitballing, but here goes:

• What if a hard maximum was placed on the amount of posts or comments any user can make a day? Like 50? Or 100? Even 200? Certainly no human being needs to or is likely to be able to make more comments a day than that, yes?
• What if there was a word minimum placed on how many words are necessary for a comment to earn SBD? Like say 5, or 10? Surely every real human being can muster a full sentence at least, yes?
• While we’re at it, is it unreasonable for posts themselves to have a word limit in order to earn SBD?
• How about bots, or something in the code itself, that can detect if the same account repeats the same words or sentences more than a small minimum amount of times per day and then flag or prevent those comments from being able to earn anything?
• How about making it worth something to flag? I realize this could be opening a whole can of worms on it’s own, but perhaps there could be some kind of system where certain people are voted on by the community to “police” posts and comments to be able to catch and stop the spammers? I mean, isn’t kind of the whole motto and basis of Steemit to be Proof of Brain?

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for right now. I’m sure there’s lots of people smarter than me who can come up with much better solutions. One of my main points though is that all you Big Whales out there need to remember that you need to take care of and protect us minnows and small fry, or you’re not going to have your cash pool to swim in and enjoy for too much longer. Just like in the real world, if we don’t be more aware of, and ensure the health (and Happiness ;~) of the smallest but most populous members of our world, none of us are going to be able to continue to live in and enjoy it.

Wishing all of ya all the best!

Steem on!