When the reputation system released, we were all excited.

I figured that even though I hadn’t received the blessing of a whale yet, this new tool could help me gain a following. My rating of five seemed pretty good, until I checked a friend’s, who was at 6. This led to realize because she had received two medium payouts, she had a higher reputation because while I’d gotten plenty more (human) uptucks, I’d never broken $3. So you might be thinking,

The problem is that with the way that reputation is structured, it's only an indicator of previously high payouts, rather than acting as a counterweight to whale voting. By this, I mean that whales now have double the impact, as not only do they reward payout for that post alone, they also have a lot of power in raising your reputation, rewarding future post. Unfortunately, the only way to raise your reputation with any significance is the same as the only way to get a big payout – getting lucky by catching a whale. This is because the reputation rewarded is tied to the steem power of the voter, instead of being representative of quantity of upvotes. This leads to another problem, which comes as a result of reputation's current design.

The result is that the rich get richer.

When you see an author with an eight, you think, “Wow, they must produce great content.” That’s not the issue – I’m sure they do have quality content. The problem is the barriers of entry for new creators are raised substantially. If whales start to only read 8’s, then nobody else is going to reach 8 except with a huge amount of dolphin upvotes. This isn't to say they'll filter their views based on rating, but the fact is higher ratings will bring higher views, tilting the scales in the favor of those who grew big on Steemit early. This can discourage new users, for it's very difficult to gain the same attention, even if appealing to the little guys. To illustrate my point, even if you have 1000’s of minnow upvotes, you still won’t have the reputation granted by a whale. This also hurts the curation aspect, as minnows already didn't have much of an effect on payout, but again, now that is doubly so when they can't influence reputation to any real effect.

As you might infer from my discussion above, I propose to make it upvote-based, to counter-balance earnings. This will help new authors out, because while they may not get the attention of whales, they can still develop their reputation on the site, especially if they go through the motions of marketing, networking, and promotion. Whales would still influence article views through payouts, but this would let the little guys help others get views too.

So that's my analysis of the problem and my idea of the solution. If you have another idea, I'd love for you to share. I hope you enjoyed my article, and feel free to check out my other content.

(Author’s Note: To clarify, this article is not raising issue with payouts or the influence of whales on payouts, but trying to refocus the reputation system to help newer creators and allow minnows to have somewhat more of a voice)

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!