Thanks to a fabulous new feature in SteemStats.com, called Vote Inspector, we can peek into the distribution and weightages of votes that make up the curation rewards.
Naturally, I went ahead and checked up the top two Trending posts.
and
/@steemdrive/sa-s-city-of-durban-to-be-engulfed-by-steem-the-world-to-follow
Here's what I found -
We knew it would be the top few making up a vast majority of the votes, but I am still surprised. You can clearly see the algorithms in action. In both cases, the top 10 voters out of 100s made up cumulatively 80+% of the weightage.
Thanks to being early, in one case a single user accounted for over half the weight! It's also interesting to see that steemers who are early can be more influential than steemers who have ten times or more the Steem Power.
Fascinating stuff. Do post if you find interesting numbers like this for other posts or see some more interesting patterns.
Addendum
I posted this 8 hours ago. I have been looking at vote breakdowns for a bunch of trending posts, and I have found one that is remarkably different from this rest. This is @ozchartart's analysis post. @ozchartart/usdsteem-btc-technical-analysis
This is what it looks like -
Unlike most other posts, the top few cover only ~35% of the weightage! My most interesting observation is by being 5 hours earlier than than @rainman, @ozmaster has outweighed someone with 160x the Steem Power.
I suppose this is a glimpse into the future - when the platform balances out and influence no longer lies with the very few.