RE: Steem Power, and the nature of power on Steemit
Thankyou for your service.
Interestingly, we originally had quadratic, instead of linear rewards; so posts were paid based on the square of the total vp used to upvote them.
Most posts would make less than 10c, but the best ones would pull in $12-15,000
A lot of people hated that and it was changed to linear a long time ago, giving a flatter reward structure.
The justification for quadratic rewards was that it was a mechanism to prevent self upvoting.
The bigger a payout became; the greater one's ability to affect the balance, up or down.
A user with a 50c 100% upvote now, would have had a 5c vote on a low value post, and a $5 vote on a high value post.
People know that their 50c downvote won't hurt big abusers; and choose to just upvote themselves that 50c instead.
Under quadratic rewards, the incentives shift and they choose between downvoting a big, abusers post $5, or upvoting themselves 5c.
I'm amazed at how quickly the community dispensed with quadratic rewards; as it was our only real bulwark against the kind of abuse we're seeing now.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment @mattclarke. I can see how the quadratic rewards might have been problematic, but as you say, changing them as effectively just moved the problem to a different kind of behaviour.
The problem is that the people who will benefit most from self-voting are the ones with witness votes that actually matter.
I had noticed that - thought it was fairly well implied in what I wrote. But yes, in this sense, as I've said in a few comments when other people complain, Steem appears to have re-created the situation where the rich have the power to serve themselves. We simply don't have enough low SP users to overrun them right now. If we did, then they would have to at least try to keep us on-side.
It was well implied in your post, perhaps I didn't make my own point clear enough. I was trying to say that quadratic voting was done away with because those that wanted it gone were the ones who had the power to do away with it.
No matter how far you run, you can't escape the 1% eh?
Aha - I get you now, thanks.