Note your point is very valid as a potential criticism of my plan to remove the quadratic reward (and make it linear). But with the linear reward, then more women can get a few bucks, than a few women gettings $1000s.
This goes to show you don't understand on of the main driver that brings people to Steem.
People struggle to make the ends meet, that's why they buy lottery tickets. Do you think they would buy lottery tickets if lottery was egalitarian and low risk / low reward? People don't put 5 bucks in lottery tickets to earn up to 10 bucks with a decent probability or get half their money back. People buy lottery tickets for the tiny chance of making it so big that they can quit their shit job and give the middle finger to their asshole boss. And if they don't get that, they are fine to lose their money and keep trying painstakingly every week. That's how despaired people are.
The primary driver that brings people to Steem is dream. Millions of people already post content. It costs them nothing to post content. They do it anyway out of boredom and loneliness, because that gives them the feeling of being part of something. So now they can turn this content into lottery tickets, and not only does it pay big when it works, but it also has a significantly higher chance of hitting! And they don't need to wait one week or one month for the draw. The draw happens everyday. Everyday they get that rush of dopamine, and it's damn good, and it's damn addictive. It's like gambling except that there is no risk of ending bankrupt. And when they don't hit big, they still have the consolation prize, they build up a little bit of karma and can dream of a more remote, future day where the little karma they earned will be worth thousand times more like it happened for early bitcoiners.
If you look at things from that perspective, Steem has got it right all across the board.
* Shit posts make thousands of bucks? That's exactly what should be happening, because if it wasn't the case, Joe blogger would not stand a chance of earning anything, and he would know it.
* Payouts are totally unbalanced? Lotto effect, selling dreams.
* Daily payout? that's a lottery draw every single fscking day ... If you posted today => continuous engagement, addiction.
* Whales hold all the power? That's precisely why all the wholesome unbalance is happening. Whales are instrumental in detecting new members that can bring them more users and shower them with cash to buy their loyalty (see @dollarvigilante for ex), and making things look as arbitrary as possible for the rest of their votes so that people think (and rightly so) that even them can make it big one day, and that day may be just around the corner.
* Really cheesy stuff gets paid thousands? That's also great because everyone has cheesy stuff to write. Got big boobs -> can make money. Got cute toddlers or pets -> can make money. Got a cool car? -> can make money. Are a big attention whore? -> can make money. Are a silly selfie taking teen? -> can make money. And what if you've got nothing of the above? Well, see, that gets even better. Are bipolar, autistic, depressed, suicidal? -> Can make money. Are a big drug junkie? -> Can make money. Just got out of jail, or even better still in jail? -> Can make money. Got raped or abused or mugged or whatever? -> Can make money. Got fired from you job? -> Can make money. In fact, the more shit or bizarre things that happened to you, the more likely it is that you gonna make money telling them. The only people who don't make money on Steem are people who have a boring uneventful tepid life with zero feeling of joy or pain or despair or rage, and these aren't the people who need Steem in their life anyway. They'll just follow eventually when everyone else is on Steem.
So the bottom line is that I see Steem is doing just the right thing. You can make a clone, but it won't be quite as successful unless you copy their model. And if you copy their model, then what's the selling point of your clone?
As one of the posters mentioned above (don't remember who), there is a niche for longer term quality content. Steem is focused on short term earnings. Posts receive the bulk of their attention and revenue within 24h, and catch the few late voters within a 30-day window. The Steemit page makes it almost impossible to find content older than 30 days and quite difficult to find content older than 24h unless it was a huge hit. There is no way to keep receiving payouts past 30 days, so Steem is a bad fit for serious professional content writers who normally earn royalties for life on their content. Steem isn't a good fit for professional novelists, artists, researchers etc. A clone that would target the longer term would have no difficulty cornering the market because Steem just doesn't try to be that so there won't be any competition at all. And there is no need of rewriting the code. Steem technology is pretty good. The only thing that is needed is change the incentives to encourage voting for the long term, like buying equity in the post to benefit from future (possibly remote) prospects and change the Steemit web front-end to allow structured access by theme and advanced search instead of the currently "hot / trending" system that caters to a very short term / narrow attention span type of consumption.
I'd be interested helping with developing / launching a clone like that (I'm a very experienced C++ dev). But I'm not interested trying to compete with Steem when it's obvious to me that they are already doing everything that they need to do to reach hyper-growth. Actually, it's been 7 years that cryptocurrencies are trying to escape the gravity pull of geekdom to launch into mainstream. The closer we have ever been was Dogecoin, and it was just a flash in the pan. Steem is the first crypto to make it into Joe space. If you / me / anyone around here really know better, why is it that none of us managed to pull what they just pulled? What are our chances to beat them at a game none of us even realized was possible a few months ago? Why not instead just seize effortlessly the other totally empty niches that Steem tech has just made possible?
