The Chinese dragon in the room
Sometimes Steemit feels like Hong Kong. It's a small place and you'll get to meet a lot of people who you'll like and dislike you very quickly. A lot of people complain to me on daily basis about the abuse of whale downvoting powers, and after speaking to the community manager @andrarchy and others, we are trying our best to fix it.
But being a small island like Hong Kong we should be able to solve our problems much more quickly, but this is plainly not the case as the egos of whales stand in our way. In a way they feel like the benevolent China overseeing the everyday free activities of the Hong Kong residents. It feels like a kind of pseudo-freedom though. You can feel the dragon is there in the room.
The Steemit council
Steemit has a system of witnesses that act like a council and oversee things, but a lot of their decisions are weighted towards the rich whales, and most when they publish content on the reportage of the network are heavily rewarded as a result.
I've read some terrible witness reports that make a lot of money. Some are excellent like those of @timcliff - I do recommend you follow this quality witness, and vote for him in the future.
Most of the prosperity is wasted on this site, as most whales don't know how to delegate Steem Power via the CLI wallet, so quality writing goes unrewarded and the SP wastes away in their wallets. More whales need to consider delegating their extreme powers to others more.
But while most of Hong Kong's prosperity comes from Mao finding it convenient when normal trade relations did not exist elsewhere, the world of Steemit would be a lot less able without our whales, so we must also be thankful to them for the initial task they have fulfilled. But change will need to come. Even Hong Kong never stayed the same forever. 1997 anyone? Beware the dragon!
Steem on my friends!