This isn't a binary thing. It's part of some very complex ever-changing dynamics.
We have two and half years of experience across various other tweaks in the reward system to see basically the same result. Stakeholders, by and large, don't want to waste their valuable earning potential on downvotes or not voting (there are always exceptions but they are precisely that).
At some point, the bulk of the stakeholders even agreed to refrain from voting to a large extent forgoing a lot of rewards.
Yes it was me (along with abit) who organized and promoted that so I'm quite aware of it. Having been there, I can tell you it wasn't sustainable. Even if abit and I were willing to continue doing what we were doing indefinitely, the other major stakeholders were not, and in the place of the largest stakeholders, the next largest were starting to do the same thing.
That sort of crab bucket approach does not work if downvotes are too expensive. Other than that, it could very well work. I've even said that with cheap downvotes n^2 could work. It might produce different results than what many in the community want in terms of reward distribution, but it might be (probably would be) a whole lot better than what we saw with n^2 and no cheap downvotes.
I agree with most of the points you've made and our disagreements aren't fundamental disagreements.
I wanted to state my truth as clear as possible. The selfless are losing some ROI to the selfish in a flawed system.
Selfishness is not a long term successful approach. Since it's not sustainable. The selfless are losing in the short term frame yes. But they can build up stronger relationships that lasts for a life time. In the end the goal is to use Tokens to produce higher leverage by investing in human brains that think big and long term.
This space needs to evolve into digital jobs eventually if you truly want to maximise ROI. At the moment since it's such a new field everyone is just trying to do some blogging with random stuff. More organisation is needed. Niches + Community systems. And moderators that own various Niches would be an interesting experiment. People focusing on niches that they love. Therefore everyone is getting more of what they want.
Thank you for the discussion.
the only get rich here is the bots. that's the reality, just saying