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RE: Will Steemit, Inc's Struggles Lead to Steem's Decentralized Success?
From a pure token distribution point of view the other accounts are hardly problematic at all. The largest non-Steemit account has about 3.5% of the stake and the others are smaller still, with only a handful above 1%. This is actually a quite flat distribution in economic terms and in terms of voting dynamics. No one other than Steemit is in a position to exercise a controlling interest and even small coalitions can't dominate the voting.
The social platform has always struggled to work well for various reasons, but I don't think stake distribution in and of itself is really the problem there, at least not if one has any sort of realistic view of what ownership distribution of tokens to expect going in.
In terms of witness voting dynamics, I agree, but the context of my comment relates more to the social media side of things and the current culture of flag wars / lack of downvotes / etc. From the perspective of those who have been on the receiving end of a few whales who flag with the purpose of demonstrating their unrestrained influenced, it feels very centralized. Unless people counter upvotes and downvotes to better match community consensus, it becomes a point of centralization that only a few people can dictate which content is rewarded and which content is hidden by default.
This is all under the "false narratives" mentioned by Ned which I commented on in my latest post. Maybe it no longer applies if we change our expectations concerning what Steem is really about?
I wasn't referring to witness voting specifically, just the general token distribution in and of itself, and how that relates to any sort of voting built on top of it.
IMO the social platform has problems that are more specific to its design than to a 'problem' with the token distribution itself. Apart from Steemit Inc's stake, I think the token distribution is about as good as one could ever hope for in practical terms. If the social platform doesn't work on top of this distribution, it just plain doesn't work and needs revision of its own structure. Changing expectations and narratives is another way to approach it, yes.
What source are you using for token distribution? I was under the impression a lot of whale accounts simply moved their holdings around to multiple addresses and the distribution still wasn't all that good. Maybe it's more a perception than a reality in that those who do have larger stake and use it to excessively self-vote or downvote people they don't like seems more outrageous. When I last looked at breakdowns of minnows, dolphins, orcas, and whales, it sure seemed like the whales owned most of the currency, but maybe I'm misinformed and that was just being skewed by Steemit, Inc accounts.
The original whale accounts weren't even that big anyway 1-2% (mathematically impossible for them to be much larger when Steemit started with 80%).
Now of course it is possible people have bought more and accumulated much larger (but broken up) stakes by now but I've seen no evidence of it (and not even 1% is needed for the kinds of issues you describe with the social layer).
Yes you are referring to the dynamics of how the social layer works. I agree not that well. But I don't think you can pin this on the distribution being excessively concentrated. By general economic standards it doesn't appear to be at all. Rather I'd argue the contrary: the social layer isn't capable of handling even normal and moderate degrees of concentration without causing results that many find disappointing. This is a problem with the social layer.
Probably skewed to some extent (bear in mind that even excluding the steemit account itself, most accounting of 'whales' include steemit team/founder accounts, part of the original 80% ninja-mine), but look, if you have people with 1-2% each, not really obscene amounts, and there are even 10-20 of them, that's going to be a high % of the total. Just how the math works out. This is basically normal. What percentage of the world's population owns 50% of the wealth? How many shareholders of the typical company does it take to reach 50%, etc.?
Expecting ownership of any asset to not be concentrated at all is very unrealistic.