Thanks for the detailed analysis.
Low SP users do not gain any benefit at all from a self-vote at 0 minutes if their vote amount is less than the dust threshold.
I don't believe this is true. One of my experimental accounts has a 1c vote and has still been able to move the needle with instant votes. I should use one of the other ones and do a more-controlled experiment, though. I'll do that with @blueox in a minute actually.
Under HF20 it will no longer be possible to automatically receive 100%+ return on a self vote.
- Make a bunch of comments
- Find one nobody's voted on that's at least 15 minutes old
- Vote it.
I said automatically - voting comments still requires there be one at least 15 minutes old with no self vote. In practice that is likely to be easy to accomplish, but in practice a huge account that engages in that behavior would also likely result in other users setting up a script to try to front run the self vote on the comment. Either way, it isn't automatic like the current setup is (you are guaranteed a minimum of 100% return on a 0 minute self vote now), and it also won't result in greater than 100% ROI.
Ultimately I think the flaw in the way you have been looking at this whole thing is you are focusing on what accounts will lose without looking at what share of the (increased) reward pool they gain back. I think it is very clear the highest SP accounts will lose something, and the lowest SP accounts will gain something in net reward. I don't think it is possible to get exact figures in advance but there is no way this is not a net gain for the under 500 SP accounts.
This is well within our scripting capabilities. You still have to make the comments, but making comments is easier than making posts.
There's more than one way to look at losing. Both you and Paula have decided to look at what current posts will gain or lose rather than looking at how much of your stake reward will go to places you didn't choose if you vote naively. That's way more important to me. If the system is burning 7% of total vote value that means a lot to me as a voter.
I can now confirm that the idea that accounts below the dust threshold don't gain any extra value from immediate self-voting is false. I'll make a post about it a little later.
Thanks - edited the post to note this :) The broader point still stands. The accounts that previously were best taking advantage of 0 minute self voting will receive a smaller % of the reward pool under HF20 - this equals a larger % of the reward pool for everyone else. The data in my analysis above shows that it was larger accounts that were best able to take advantage of 0 minute self voting (% author reward goes up with SP). This means the effect of HF20 is net positive for lower SP accounts.
Looking at the individual cases is only confusing you, as you actually don't have the data needed to see what the payout would have been under HF20. The big picture is super clear and intuitive - there is no way around that HF20 is net positive for smaller accounts.
Even if it does narrow the rewards gap over the current system, that doesn't make them the only two choices. In fact, I see no reason to think that what you're seeing has anything to do with "returning to the pool" - it's entirely a result of removing the extra author rewards, which I fully agree should be done.
When a vote "goes to the pool" - whether it's by this method, voting on a declined rewards post, flagging, or just sitting at 100% - it fundamentally broadens the rewards gap, because it's distributed proportionally by vote size. That effect here is swamped by the fact that you're removing a ton of rewards from certain large votes exploiting the bug.
Essentially you're taking a big chunk of money and narrowing the gap, and then using it to widen the gap again, differently, and somewhat less. Taking the money is probably a good idea, but it could be used in a different fashion that doesn't do that.
At least there you are finally saying that the net effect of hf20 is to narrow the gap.
I still think you are missing the big picture. The smallest accounts are always going to have the least amount of votes coming in shortly after posting and people jockying around for optimal curation reward vote time. The largest accounts are always going to have the largest amount of votes coming in shortly after posting and people jockying around for optimal curation reward vote time. If the early curation rewards are returned to the pool, the largest accounts will "send" proportionally more reward back to the pool - it decreases the % of the pool dominated by the large accounts.
If those rewards stay in the post pool, whether it is in the author reward for the post as in your proposal or the curation reward for the post as in earlier proposal advocated by @davemccoy among others, it doesn't do anything for the smaller accounts - the % of the pool dominated by the large accounts stays the same!
In effect this argument is that smaller accounts will be more effective at discouraging pre-fifteen-minute votes (relative to total votes received) than large accounts. That seems unlikely to me since larger accounts are almost universally more sophisticated users.
I've been pondering a project to vote accounts with large expected payouts at minute zero to create this effect intentionally. I think once more people are paying attention to this issue the consensus will be that it's incredibly stupid that I will be able to do that. But we will see.
And here's the post.