any rewards reduced from high payouts by downvotes goes directly to increase the broader small payouts.
I do wonder how that technically works. When someone has voted on my post and someone downvotes it with the same amount, the money isn't added up to other posts, is it. And it also doesn't give the rest of the curators more to spend.
All of the payouts come from a pool that is a fixed size at any point in time. When one post gets less, others get more. Downvoting one post is equivalent to upvoting every other post getting a payout by a small amount, assuming it were actually feasible to do that.
Ah, so when (hypothetically) there are only two posts with votes, both with $5 rewards and one gets zeroed out by a downvote, the payout for the other increases to $10?
It's interesting to know how it really works. I think many people don't know how it works.
Yes that example is correct.
Another interesting point is that if one post gets massively more upvotes, its rewards will increase to say 9.99 and the other will decrease to 0.01 without being downvoted.
Downvotes and upvotes are both ways of allocating the pool between posts.