Whales, Dolphins and Steemit Ecosystem Health

I love whales and dolphins, not only the real ones that gracefully swim in our oceans and inland waters, but also the ones that exist in the Steemit ecosystem. I believe that the whales and dolphins of steemit have made steemit into the growing success it is. I say growing because it's still early and things can change fast in an online ecosystem. But I do want to say from the start that, without these whales and dolphins, steemit would not have grown so fast and become so rewarding for many. However, there is a major problem that exists, not by any ones design I believe, and that is that there not enough diversity. As with any ecosystem, whether they be online ones or the much more ancient ones we all live in, diversity is a strength, and a lack of diversity can be detrimental.

Diversity and Steemit Ecosystem Health

There is an interesting little steemit app you can access on steemit that is called "Steem Analytics" produced by @mauritso. It mainly consist of a pie chart that shows the current vote distribution for posts. You can click a button so that you only see the votes of the top 100 steem power holders. The latest pie chart is below and you can see that posts that deal with steemit or steem together account for 45.8% of the votes.

You can also choose to look at the votes for the last 30 days, and that one looks like this.

Here the votes for steemit plus steem posts among the top 100 users is 38.2%. This shows a possible trend toward fewer votes for these two categories, but still they account for a huge chunk of the votes, given how many different topics people write about. It is worth noting that comparing votes over all time to the last 30 days shows that a couple of topics like art and photography have increased. Perhaps this is a good sign. Also worth noting is that votes for introduceyourself went from 17.2% for all time to 11.9% for the last 30 days. This is a 31% drop. This could mean that fewer people are joining and or introducing themselves, or they introduce themselves but are not acknowledged by getting upvotes. In either case, this is not a good thing.

The Implication

Although in terms of the number of topics and the number of posts contributed to those topics, diversity is high(just explore for yourself), the voting diversity is lopsided, and remember that voting is what supports people. The reason this is important is that, as much as steemit has grown, it is not mainstream and the jump to mainstream is what is needed to really make steemit successful and compete with those other large mainstream social media platforms. But the mainstream will not adopt a social media platform that gives rewards for posting, when most rewards go to posts that are about non-mainstream topics. There is nothing wrong with these topics, they should be supported and voted on. They have some great content that I enjoy reading myself, but they dominate the steemit ecosystem, and may be preventing an expansion of healthy diversity.

Why should this matter to the whales and dolphins? It should because they have a lot invested in this. If steemit doesn't continue to grow and expand into the mainstream, the value of steem will continue to be diluted, and that could cost them a lot. The influx of the mainstream into steemit will counter the price dilution and make steemit more sustainable.