It started approximately 12 hours ago, and was announced by @abit in this post.

Very short, this experiment aims at stopping whales voting for a while, leaving the reward pool at the discretion of dolphins and minnows. As you know, the power distribution in Steemit is heavily (im)balanced towards whales, who can move significant amounts of Steem from the rewards pool with just one vote. This experiments aims at understanding how the rewards will look like if there is a more balanced distribution of power amongst voters. So it's good.

Now, the communication could have been a lot better, especially the first post announcing this. It was just: "ok, we start this experiment". No word about how long it will take, how it will be measured, and so on.

I had my own interesting encounters with @abit and I agree his style is sometimes hard to understand, or even blunt. For instance, I made a proposal for a new voting mechanism a few days ago and, while he did provide feedback on it, he also suggested that I was sloppy and "I'm not really a developer". After this encounter I decided to stop making proposals for the improvement of the Steemit platform, feeling strongly that I kind of overdid it. I also strongly felt it's not really my job to do this. In the spirit of transparency I will also note that after a short exchange of comments @abit apologized for his comment.

As we can see, communication may not be the strongest skill of some of the people here. But that doesn't mean they are inherently ill intended. Or they don't know what they are doing. On the contrary. From what I saw on github during the last few months, @abit had a tremendous contribution to the security of the platform. Kudoz for that. Like, really. I feel good knowing that someone takes the fabric of the platform so seriously.

So, although this test was poorly communicated, I decided to fully support it, hence this announcement. I think it will help the community understand a lot more of its own dynamics.

Attention!

As part of this experiment, you may see downvotes on your posts, from some whales. This has nothing to do with your post, per se, but with other whales who are voting prior to that, mixing up the results of the test.

One of the whales participating in this, @smooth, had created an automated notice to go with these downvotes:

A downvote was applied to partially counter earlier whale voles as an experiment to reduce whale domination of voting influence. Not intended to express an opinion on the content nor result in a net reduction of rewards or reputation (automated notice)

Other members of the platform who wrote about this test:

Really looking forward to the final results of this experiment.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

There's An Experiment Running On Steemit Now: Whales Making Room For Dolphins And Minnows

Attention!