RE: What's a Minnow to do? The Game Theory of Steem, Part 4

[biophil]

Sure, those are fair comments. But take a close look at my article - I'm arguing that even if everybody could find what they like, they would still be incentivized to vote with the crowd.

Comments

[anonymint]

I’ve concluded that the minnows have the incentive to always vote their conscience:

The curator rewards are such a small fraction of the voter’s Steem Power, that only those with significant Steem Power are economically motivated by curator rewards. Thus we could posit that minnow voters have no great mental calculation cost when voting since they can vote their conscience without significant curator reward implications. Although the minnows don’t individually have much impact on the payout rewards, collectively they do since there are many more of them than there are whales. Thus we can conclude the white paper is more or less correct w.r.t. to minnows and w.r.t. to whales, the votes are not a replacement for micropayments because the whale’s vote doesn’t involve an insignificant economic value.

Nevertheless the dominant game theory seems to remain that the most upvoted posts are likely to be the most upvoted in a vortex of one-size-fits-all, simply because other posts get buried and not seen. And if whales vote early enough, they drive which posts get seen the most. And whales have a dominant game theory which would be to vote for the most popular posts if they were motivated by the curator rewards, but for the largest of the whales that is unlikely to be the case because:

1. Their time is too expensive to spend it doing curating all the time, thus they can’t amass significant curator rewards relative to their Steem Power holdings.
2. They are more motivated by the long-term success of the site.

Hypothetically a potential improvement appears to be the one I blogged.

Another fly-in-the-ointment is that minnows can potentially be a Sybil attack, since there is no way to really confirm that a sign up is a unique user.

[biophil]

Yeah, I think that all makes a lot of sense. Curator rewards are so small for minnows that it's all dust - we can't say it's irrational to vote for what you like because it will mean forfeiting 0.003 SP.

[anonymint]

1. Their time is too expensive to spend it doing curating all the time, thus they can’t amass significant curator rewards relative to their Steem Power holdings.

I realized they could employ a bot.