The vast majority of this post has nothing to do with how the voting system works on the backend (except one change, removing variable vote power). This isn't magical witchcraft mathematics to balance who gets what and who is voting how much, it's a simpler way to digest how the voting system works that more people are going to understand.
You may understand the system just fine, and how the percentages and powers play off each other, but 99% of the world is never going to understand "standard deviation based system for distributing rshares based on SP".
They're going to understand "Ok, I get 50 of these things a day I can use".
UX man, UX! :)
Just as a side note, i know youre the DB god and everything... do we know what the mean and standard deviaiton for SP is? Its info that i think would be really useful in terms of evaluating centralization and distribution.
UX... is .... user experience.. i had to look that up. OK, fair enough. That said, i think the current system (especially with apps like steemstats) is pretty organic and easy to get a feel for, even if most users don't have a percise mathematical grasp of whats going on. My impression reading the white paper about zipfs theorom is that this was the intention... ie, that power was supposed to decrease on a scale that really wouldn't effect anyone except chronic overvoters and vote bots. I guess i see your point about people not getting the internals of how this works... but is there really any indication that they want to watch the sausage being made?
I think a big part of UX is continuity.
I don't know whether i caught it from blocktrades, but im really starting to look askance at any fiddling with how we vote.
I could probably toss together a chart, I think I have the historical data for it. Maybe only a few days/weeks worth, but I can make sure it is recording. I'd probably just need some ideas on what kind of information to present and what would be useful, just to make sure I'm actually recording it.
I don't think they do, and I think the percentages force them to learn if they want to even understand it even a little bit. We see problems with the public not understanding that you can divide BTC into decimals... and the answer has always been "use bits or satoshis, it's easier to understand". This whole idea is akin to that, and fights the same source of confusion.
I'd love to hear what @blocktrades has to think too. I am also in agreement that things need to stop changing and the experience for new users should be focused on. Growth hacks should be a priority. I think this might qualify as one of those trades though, as your average joe is going to understand it better than a percentage and a voting power.