I have been reading the Steemit Statistics posts compiled by @arcange on a regular basis (and now it has been translated into different languages which is great), and the motivation for this post came from talking to some of the people on Steemit who feel like they don't really have much of a say in what goes on around here and that perhaps the distribution of wealth/power is on a tipping point where changes are required. 

Now if we think about the typical rules regarding the distribution of power/wealth using the 80/20 rule, you may expect that somewhere around 20% of the people probably holds about 80% of the power (or something like that). So I looked at one of the websites that tries to estimate the proportion of adults and the wealth that they represent:

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmXNGLptvPeMawSffAdDhSPSJ1ZzeE4vPcMAA17CMSvvE7/image.png)
https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/

Here we are talking about less than 10% of the adults with over 80% of the wealth share in terms of their income, which as we know is rather disturbing and a sign of income equality across the globe.

This prompted me to look a little bit more closely at the latest statistics to see what the numbers tell us about the distribution of voting power on Steemit looked like, and two of the graphs provided the key information:

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmZA9e5tRSPKKhXiNNUVpwhEbLYQtyhpXZRTCyftRmpshT/image.png)
https://steemit.com/statistics/@arcange/steemit-statistics-20171111-en

Based on the figures provided in these two charts I compiled the following table with some quick calculations:
![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUjuugp3Qs6rC5Q4u89xP4UnEc6ETbJ1p8FtMpDsgwifD/image.png)
I will come back to the two figures that I calculated from this information, which is the species equivalent and whale equivalent values, but first let's just look at the distribution of accounts and voting power.

What you can see visually is that each category of users are about one order of magnitude (roughly) less than the previous category (I used a log scale to make this easier to see), but the real difference in voting power is actually most significant between the Whales and everyone else:
![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmZAxQR5GJFdZnmyNYeFgRsrq86ZNpY4cyH1Y7hG9iP5Li/image.png)

Take away the 'inactive' accounts (no posts, comments or upvotes for a certain period of time) and you have essential a three-tier society where the Minnows, Dolphins and Orcas make up the 'middle class':

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmSVWun88F1QhESVbivT2dTSEiNq9frWabi8hn9jFL26La/image.png)

So let's come back to the 80/20 rule and see what the distribution of headcount and voting power looks like without the inactive accounts:

Here is the percentage of each user category in the overall population:
![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUtQA1dP4Rp8zZzW4Q85oMvt56P4b33K9rJg1uodRTczN/image.png)

And the percentage of overall voting power represented by each category:
![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmYkMYENv1g7RPTKn611qWUSNXxprVRAzedkNmYNzQRkKe/image.png)

And we thought the figures in the global income inequality was a cause for concern... here we are talking about 91% of the population holding 1% of the voting influence compared to 71% of the low income group holding 3% of the wealth. And on the other end of the scale, you have whales that make up less than 1% of the user accounts holding over 70% of the voting influence.

Finally, to put all of this in perspective, let me get back to the original question in the post, and what the two values that I calculated means:

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmbMQqpFDQWF7igh42SHUZUPDuyLu91YQNWqnRQ6mKFdHX/image.png)

The species equivalent value is the total voting power of the entire user category (I use the term species here very loosely) as a ratio of the average voting power of a single whale . So this means that all the voting power of the redfish added together is still only equal to half of the average voting power of a whale (and there are 42 of them out there swimming in the ocean). Luckily, the total voting power of all the minnows is equivalent to 2.5 whales, which means that they can potentially rise up as one against one unreasonable whale at least.

The whale equivalent then, is the total number of users in a category required to reach the average voting power of one whale. Simply put, if you want to have the average voting influence of one whale then you only have to convince 150k redfish users (even though there are only around 70k of them) to hold a similar opinion, or 26 orca users. That would mean just to simply exert the same influence of a whale it requires both the 'lower class' of redfish users and at least one segment of the 'middle class' to hold the same view, or over 90% of the active users to agree on something, which is as close to a unanimous decision as you can get in modern society.

Is this distribution of user category and voting influence cause for concern, and does it relate to the relative stability that we have seen in other types of organisation where a very large and disproportionate distribution of power keeps the rest of the population in check? I guess only time will tell...


'I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you...

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