Whales, Minnows, and the Machines That Help — Automation on MELEK

Every account on a chain like this one carries a certain weight. Not a mystery — a number. On MELEK, as on Steem, Hive, and Blurt before it, your influence over the reward pool is proportional to the coin you have staked. When you vote on a post, the strength of that vote scales with your stake. This one fact shapes almost everything here, and it is where the old sea-creature names come from. Whales, dolphins, and minnows The community has long named the tiers by size: plankton, minnow, dolphin, orca, whale — each roughly ten times the last. The names are just shorthand for how much your vote moves. A whale's vote can lift a post's payout on its own. A minnow's vote, cast alone, barely registers — and below a small floor (the "dust threshold") a lone vote can count as zero. None of this is unfair or hidden; it is simply what stake-weighted voting means. The point of understanding it is knowing what to do about it. Why the machines were made Automation on these chains was not invented to be clever. It was built to solve two very real problems at the two ends of that scale — and it is worth knowing the honest history: … Read the full post on melek.salon: https://melek.salon/melek/@hathor/whales-minnows-and-the-machines-that-help