Great perspective we definitely do need more middle class users, the divide of power gap is too wide. I get 50 votes sometimes that only equal .40 cents all from just minnows. Better then nothing I guess, but don't get me wrong wish it was much more then pennies.
http://i.giphy.com/3o7TKAwnruRFfywQ0M.gif

I think That the steemit platform is growing 
and having growing pains
I heard the stories of other companies
that have experienced this
I assume now that block chain 
is not immune from this. 
Changes are cool though
Whales need to be required to use a % 
of votes to up vote minnows
I now have writers block,
Ok,
Everyone Should have to login every week
 and more than 1 time, 
Maybe 3-5 days a week?
upvote, comment, post, etc......
I hope this helps

Loved this article. I think at this point that I'd have to argue that helping minnows and gaining followers is just as important as whale votes. If you are not on a whale bot list, you may only receive a high payout once. That is not necessarily sustainable.

Helping people and continuing to make interesting content will lead to people interested in what you have to say. Most everyone who has not invested a dime in the platform started as a minnow. If you help a minnow who surpasses you quickly and are friends with them (someone like @sirwinchester or @ms.steemit) to me they are valuable not just because they are extremely good at managing time and making great content, but also because they are my friends and friends usually tend to help one another out.

Yes the money is nice on this platform, but as long as you enjoy what you are writing about then money should be a lower priority. If you passionately write about something you enjoy, it may not make a lot of money, but it may gain a few followers who in turn may be able to help you out down the line.

Also why are tunas larger than dolphins? I feel like someone should break down the different fish levels. I also think it would be cool to have your fish next to your name [Adding Whales Minnows & Dolphins Next To Usernames](https://steemit.com/steemit/@bendjmiller222/adding-whales-minnows-and-dolphins-next-to-usernames) with the possibility of having different color fish as you slowly "level up." I think that would entice some gamers to try hard to achieve a certain status based on a number of different metrics.

I'd also think that new users (each and every one of us has been through that) get kindof a distorted idea of reality when they see the trending page with hundreds to thousands of dollars in rewards for some posts. this creates high expectation in them, which quickly fades away as they see that their posts do not fare well - they are not seen since they are new. minimizing or eliminating such expectations may increase user retention.I mean let's be serious, does a piece of average content really worth say $900. I'd say no...

removing our focus from the trending page (which is where most new users spend time) may be a short-term workaround...

Really good article! I already wrote about the importance of whale upvotes and the 'Joshua Bell phenomenom' (https://steemit.com/steemit/@crypt0mine/steemit-whales-successful-blogs-and-the-joshua-bell-phenomenon)

We need a middle class. And we are too dependent on whales. We waste tons of quality content. I even saw an artist that posted once, received 0$, reposted one week later and got 263$ on exactly the same content.

Nice post. There are few activities that reward the middle class. I have been very active and I really can't justify the time I have spent here the last two months. I have time to do quick post and read a lot of post and vote on tons of post, make a few comments but none of this is rewarded much. We need middle class jobs to run this town. There aren't enough newspaper writing jobs someone must deliver the papers, set the type, support the good writers.

Well, I've found that the best way to get your posts noticed and have them earn at least 30+ SBD on every post is to be a hot chick. I think if we simply all work at being a little hotter and more female the middle class will blossom.

true, but also remember that a lot of bad content is out there.. cos someone can not be rewarded for bad content. yes agreed that when the whales backs someone , its a great uplift from the hole, and when everyone sees that, they all follow suit. , that shuold be refined  a little bit  ; so as to creat fairness in the platform.and at least fair distribution

One way to create a middle class was through mining Steem.  If they were to rework the witness/mining mix so that there are more miners rewarded each round that could move more Steem to the middle class instead of rewarding the whales. Right now 19 witnesses, 1 standby witness and 1 miner are rewarded each round. If they were to change that to 15 witnesses, 2 standby witnesses and 4 miners each round, the number of middle class miners would rapidly grow.

Thanks to the author for the article! I fully support his idea, a lot of good writers remain unnoticed

Eish ... Maybe my Follow Me Image are to big :)  Will have to work on that one!

The upper classes use voting bots, not curation.  The middle would likely do the same. No curation. Minnows curate for they believe they will be rewarded for it and possibly an early sense of duty, which fades. Curation has failed and who blames them. The new wall is filled with junk.  A whale said to me, the new wall is 19/20 trash. Who wants to dig through that.

What an intriguing problem. The main issue, as I see it, is that information is generated at a faster pace than it can be "consumed" (in lack of a better word). Why? Well, everyone wants to become one of the big fish. Or maybe they aim for the middle class. At any rate, they want their posts to be seen, and probably get some cash in the process. Of course, not everyone is a prolific writer, but that's never stopped anyone on social media. Of course, there is a control for this. The other users who read, comment and up vote (or don't). However, as a QA process, it's dysfunctional for the same reason as it is needed. There's just so much information being generated all the time. Is there a way to work around this? Maybe. But getting more controls in play might be interfering with everyone's right to express themselves. Maybe I'm not good at writing. Maybe I can't be bothered to pimp my posts with photos and graphics. Maybe I don't want to post selfies of me in a thong to get noticed (as I surely would - 1) I'm a dude, 2) My ass is hairy. Still, I should get to voice my opinions. To sum it up. I've got no suggestions, but I think getting a middle class in place is essential. Hopefully someone brighter than me knows how to get it done.

I hear your concerns, but don't agree with their validity, speaking for me personally. I don't even look at the trending page for content...

If people want to find new content... then... they need to fish in the "new" category... Searching the Trending category is looking for popular things. FO\or me, most of the popular posts, 70%, don't even interest me. What the whales upvote... meh... sometimes it's what I want, but 50/50 maybe, maybe even 25/75?

That's why I wrote my post on [making Steemit a success](https://steemit.com/steemit/@krnel/steemit-succeeds-if-we-make-it-succeed) by us the community doing the hard work to do that by writing actual quality content, and by upvoting what really matters: issues about our world, ourselves (consciousness), that can empower us to change things for the better. That's what is important for me to find and read. Other people have other concerns, my concern is at that level. I look for that quality related to important truths. If people want to help, they can contact me as I put my info on my posts and the QC featurette.

Ad for a middle class, work it baby, work it! Up the game, create valuable quality content, then you climb. You want it? Work for it. If people want to post low quality content... don't expect me to upvote it...  

But yes, a lot of it is luck even when you do create quality content, until you build a reputation and work at it more and more, eventually you get recognized because that's how the status and reputation work for people valuing and appreciating the content that someone produces.

As for the math you suggest, not sure on it, BUT I like the idea of rethinking how the voting weight is applied, maybe.... It's not like the "whales" are the only ones who can judge valuable content, but there is a reason it was made this... I think they first made it that way to prevent spammers from upvoting and scamming the system, so the majority of control was in their hands. As people who demonstrate they are content creators get recognized, they slowly climb up the SP chain and get more SP voting power weight. Imagine lame quality posters, creating a network as well, and just reciprocating circle-jerking each other's crap. There goes the quality of the platform. I don't ever do reciprocal voting, it's a psychological persuasion technique, and it's manipulative. I vote based on what I judge to be quality content I value in some way, either to help us understand more about the world, ourselves, and even to understand and help Steemit, as my above article says. That is what I value on this platform.

It makes sense in terms of keeping things in check early on. So if you understand that, then all we really need to do is work at it, those who want to stay here and actually make steemit a success by creating quality content. Those who create subpar content in general (I'm not talking about the content I don't appreciate or value), but just low quality posts in general, they don't get it, and are stuck in a pipe dream, complaining about how Steemit sucks, how its not fair, etc. 

The world doesn't work by rewarding mediocrity. People are rewarded for the work they create and the value they add, by their excellence as demonstrated by their actions. Ye shall be judged by your actions. Know them by the fruits of their labor.

To conclude with your conclusion: "Question - If we are losing good content creators from the platform, as a result of their content not being seen. How do we create a middle class faster?"

I don't see that as the case. If they were creating quality content, they would eventually be recognized. It's either low quality, or just mediocre, and they need to WORK HARDER and up their game! Improve the content, focus on higher-minded higher consciousness subjects that ACTUALLY matter in the world! LOL. Eventually, you will be rewarded. That's how I see it.

Is the voting weight imbalanced for now? Yes. Will that change? I have no doubt it will, it's just how much time are we talking? I don't know honestly... but I think @dan, @ned and whoever else is developing, have come up with a good attempt to prevent abuse, scammers, spammers, etc., and in time, things will shift from their quality control onto other's who are quality content producers and can further the quality control in a more distributed manner. This is how I have come to understand the evolution of Steemit, and honestly I agree with it from the develop founder perspective, even if it seem s"unfair" to us when we start off.

Time, effort, energy, persistence, determination, dedication. If you have that, and you actually talk about meaningful things, then it will pay off eventually. If you only have one of those, then things won't be so great: good quality but give up and abandon, or low quality but work hard and slowly gain SP just by being around the system and engaging it... Doing both is the way to success when you are not popular, not recognized, and start off at 0.

Also on FB, there is tons of content you don't see... who's complaining there? No one, because there is no money being given LOL. You have your feed. Are people complaining that they have to go through all their feed to find the "quality"... or isn't that just he default task? At least here, you get a feed of EVERYONE's content. On FB, that does not exist at all. You have to go to people pages, groups, friend ppl, or get notifications and receive a feed. Steemit gives you the option of looking at everyone's stuff. No one is forcing you to though. I choose to go and find some and make them known in my featurette posts though, because I do want the quality to get up there...

Well... that was long. Maybe it should be a post? LMAO

Take care. Peace.

EDIT: Here are some people who are featuring authors, the usual stuff, SDB paid out, etc., for those who want to get the publicity that way: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@steemsquad/hello-we-are-steemsquad-and-we-are-here-to-support-the-minnows-read-on

The re-distribution is probably happening as rapidly as possible. I don't know what the inflation rate is these days, but it's probably between 300% to 400%, which is far above the 100% target. The only way it can happen faster is probably if whales started transferring VESTS directly to authors when they voted, in addition to the generated VESTS/SBDS, but that is obviously a far-fetched suggestion. Another way would be to change the proportion of SBDs to VESTS rewarded, making it much more skewed towards VESTS, but that may upset some people and also destabilize the value of SBDs. 

In short, I guess the developers are doing as well as they can to re-distribute vesting and create a new middle class. 

The next update is coming first week September. I know, this is longer than usual, but this one will have much more data than just SP distribution. :)

Interesting viewpoint. This can help mitigate the need to value the natural result of trickle-down economics within Steemit. I never really put into mind that there could be a middle class. If you think about economic solutions that actually worked in real life, the middle class does a powerful job stimulating the economy with their liquid buying power after WWII. How would the turn out be if this was utilized in Steemit? It might be an idea now, but could end up be a revolutionary solution sometime soon. I hope @dan and @ned have a chance to check this out for a new experiment.

I think @dan and @ned are working on balancing out rewards, they have commented in some other posts about this. Great Post!

Great post! Part of the fun is stumbling into terrible posts and then finding gems hidden way down in the 'new' feed. 

I think we should remind each other that this is supposed to be fun. Yeah, we work hard to create content. Some of us are better at it than others. And yeah the rewards can be awesome and really crappy. 

If everyone helps a little bit: a comment a day, at least 20 upvotes a day, etc. then this platform could blossom into something really amazing!  But we also have to remember that it will take time. I'm seeing great ideas on how to improve the voting system and the developers are reading them and taking them into consideration. I think we already have all the tools we need to grow the middle class.

Very interesting. Had some time to think today, and having read some of the posts flying around thought I will put my ideas about Steem on paper and ask @jacor to publish (so that some more eyes can get to see it). I am relatively new, and have not done the post a day. But it takes a lot of time, and as a newbie, only have one or two people react to my posts is disheartening. At the very least I am sure I will get some conversation going in my writings. I tend to on other platforms such as LinkedIN, Twitter and Facebook. I take it that my stuff my be uninteresting for most, but I do not believe that, and to my mind, mine is a needle in a haystack, with a minimal chance that someone that matters will see it and at the very least engage with it. Anyway, even if I am not the best writer or most interesting writer, I am an experienced and successful businessman, so once @jacoR post my article (I hope he does), I hope that a little will resonate with someone.

Happy posting you all, and thanks for the guidance and thoughts @jacor. You are the reason I am persevering. And definitely the reason why I convinced my father whom is a lifelong political and eco writer that has been published in newspapers all over the world and is a regular blogger for National Geographic to join and write on Steem. The Steem community is lucky to have guys like you.

Hi @jacor
Unfortunately I don't have an answer to your question on how to grow the middle class, but I do agree 100% with your point. Currently I am a very small fish trying to grow into this elusive middle class. I do however suffer to find the time to read many posts and do research to post articles of good content, I have not posted a researched article yet, only a few small posts . (I am only on steemit for just over a week).
In the meantime I just enjoy keeping busy on steemit.

@jacor glad I saw this in my feed.   The question certainly is how do we advance the growth of the middle class on a shorter curve than what is currently happening organically.

Right now it's a slow pace as the early adopters (us) who stay with it and post quality content regularly will be those that become the middle class as more and more users join.

What we don't know is how long that will take?  How much does the user base need to grow.   What kind of growth in active users do we need?

The robinhood initiative I read about today seems like a good idea to help the growth of the middle class...outside of that kind of blank in ideas.

Well, I am not sure if we do have a solution to this very important situation that we are currently facing. 
But would like to share a suggestion that popped into my mind while reading the post
<blockquote>Statement - In total we are currently 79 280 users on the platform. From this only 4675 people were active yesterday and 13 807 people were active in the last 7 days. In my mind all 79 280</blockquote>
Based on the above statement, it clearly shows that not even 10% of registered users were online in the past 24 hours. 

I feel people should be rewarded for participating and being active in the community and not for creating accounts and keeping it dormant. So instead of paying interests for the STEEM/STEEM POWER of the inactive accounts, this should be distributed to people who actually spend quality time on the platform. 

<b>Interests paid should keep on decreasing for the time they have spent away from the community and accounts which haven't been active for past 7 days shouldn't be paid interest at all. By doing this we would be encouraging the community to participate and be active.  </b>

Again taking reference to the above figures, so when the STEEM interests are accumulated for 79280 registered accounts but are distributed among only 13807 users who were active for past 7 days would mean we are creating a middle class who is actually happy spending some time over here and are worthily being rewarded  for it. 

This is just my suggestion and may have its own downside as well, but just thought of sharing it with fellow steemers. Let me know how you feel about it.

I'm not sure about how all will be there.
But I'm sure what everyone must try hard every time.  
Because easy to see what bad post or spam posts don't take attention and don't make any profit to author.
In the same way we all must understand what all we are sit on one boat and need cooperate and make good relationship between each user.
There is no competition where all other is your own "enemy".

If you not investor you must mostly consider on your post and content not on the only earnings on your post.

To be an *average* is not good for anyone there, you must try to be the best.

I think some sort of "Internal Market for Voting Delegation" , similar to what is described here as rshares/SD market https://steemit.com/witness-category/@arhag/witness-arhag-update-aug-9-2016-to-aug-18-2016
could do the trick really fast