Yes, whales are big here. But do you realize just HOW big?

Call me Ishmael.

Whether you're considered a minnow, a whale, or some other sea critter at Steemit is based on your number of Vests. And your vest number is related to your Steem Power number. As far as I can tell, 1 Steem Power equals approximately 2069.16 Vests. I have now idea why two different measuring systems are used to tally what's essentially the same thing, a numerical representation of your influence on the site. It is probably explained somewhere at GitHub, but I'm more nerd than geek, so if you you're more geek than nerd, maybe it makes sense to you.

As far as I can tell, Steemit.com and Busy.org are in effect two ways of looking at the same information. As far as Steemians are concerned, I would be considered to be a minnow, but my blog page at Busy categorizes me as a superuser.

Busy and Steemit both use a system of powers of 10. Here's the naming system as used at Busy:

Vests	Name
0	dust
10,000	newbie
100,000	user
1,000,000	superuser
10,000,000	hero
100,000,000	superhero
1,000,000,000	legend

So my (as of right now) 1.825 million Vests = 882 Steem Power makes me a minnow at Steemit with quite a way to go until I'm a dolphin. A minnow can dream.

I found my vest number in the upper right-hand corner of
https://steemd.com/@preparedwombat
You can find yours at
https://steemd.com/@your-username-goes-here

The Busy version of the site has seven named levels of participants. The Steemit version has fewer. Yeah, that was a bit vague. One million vests makes a superuser/minnow. A billion of them translates into a legend/whale. Other than those two levels, Steemit is a bit nebulous with things. Whereas Busy has three levels below superuser, Steemit generally lumps them all together as plankton. The correlation of hero/dolphin holds fairly well. The next step up enters murky waters. At Busy, a hundred million vests makes you a superhero. At Steemit, you become (an uneasy hush comes over the audience as he says) an Orca. As with Lord Voldemort (He Who Must Not Be Named) or some being of Lovecraftian lore, orcas are rarely mentioned in Steemit-tagged posts. Lots of minnow support, much talk of whales, some jabber about dolphins. But relative silence about the orcas. This is a mystery perhaps best left to be unraveled by future historians of the rise of Steemit to global dominance.

I have a theory that although most users here understand that whales are the big movers and shakers around here, few understand how big they are and how much they dominate the site. Note that I am not complaining about their dominance. They have pretty much all invested some serious money here. They have a lot of skin in the game. It is very much in their self-interest that little sea creatures like you and me thrive.

If you want to gain some understanding of exactly how dominant whales are at Steemit, there's no better place to look than SteemWhales.com.

Yeah, I should probably have a bunch of screenshots here but processing them is a growth area for me. At least just tonight I figured out the coding for that Busy.org table above. One thing at a time. Baby steps, baby steps.

Going to the default index page, you'll find a ranking by total account value. The first few are huge, all by themselves skewing the statistics. But they're corporate accounts, for Steemit, Inc. itself, co-founders Ned and Dan, large cryptocurrency exchanges, and so on. And total account value is maybe not the best metric to use, since it includes Steem Power (influence = vests) as well as Steem tokens and SBD which are not inherently about influence, although they could be converted to function as such.

Look at that little pie chart at the top of the page. Whales are in blue, as one-tenth of one percent of all users. Let that sink in.

Pink represents ...hush now... orcas, yellow-orange represents dolphins, minnows are shown in green, and plankton are, well, so negligible that they don't even show up.

And click on the Steem Power link to sort users by that metric. At 1,000,000,000 vests = 483,000 Steem Power = Whale status, the site only has 43 accounts that qualify as whales. Many of the users that we might all think of as whales are actually large ...hush now... orcas.

But back to that pie chart. Click on some of the other headings like Steem Dollars, Post Count, or Followers, and look at how the pie chart redraws. Then click on Curation.

Whales own curation. More than a few of them earn thousands of Steem Power per week, just from curating. Some of the whales rarely even post, curation is their bread and butter.

Learn from that revelation. Powerup every chance you get. If you're here for the long term, it makes sense in so many ways.

image credits: Pixabay

I did another whale-related post a few weeks ago, more tongue-in cheek but worth a look-see:
So You’ll Never Be A Whale. Meh.

BTC = 1P535cxV1SXkPWj1GAqxv6PqHuaCBnsqJ2
LTC = LSQNA1bCUDXKBfN5bewzBngTczxDBxCQkL
ETH = 0xB86A902A1bedF3b47b20edB5f35218k7d1k91aA66F