There's no political game. The system has a quirk where whales give out exponentially high payouts that completely crowd out 99% of us. The experiment was an agreement between whales to not vote, and instead give power back to the majority of us. For example, my trail's vote was $0.03 before the experiment, rising to $0.70 after it. You'll notice my trail voted on your first two posts - they would have made $0.03 instead of $0.70 or whatever earlier. Then your Tolkien post was picked up by @curie.
However, some whales have decided not to participate in this experiment, and exploit other whales not voting to completely dominate the rewards pool. So participants of the experiment are sacrificing their voting power to counter these votes. The flags basically neutralize the non-participating whale vote, and the entire amount is distributed back to the reward pool. Likewise, if a non-participating whale flags a post, smooth and abit will upvote it.
Basically there's not much to look at here. There's no political game or anything involved. It's a free market, and whales are doing their best to make it a better place.
The quirk where whales have exponential influence will go away in Hardfork 19, and the experiment will likely stop then. This are just short term pains for a beta platform.
PS: Your "flagged" post is also a @curie vote, and would have made $15-$20 pre-hardfork. There's still time to go before payout, so it'll keep increasing till then. So you haven't lost anything, really.
I appreciate the detailed response.
One point I disagree with you on is that this is not a political game. As you describe, some whales don't want to participate, so other whales are using their power and influence to counteract their votes. That is absolutely a political game.
What I see is people flagging my post because someone else upvoted it. That's like saying "I'm gonna vote for Trump because they voted for Hillary," even though both are terrible candidates and we would've been much better off with Gary Johnson.
At any rate, I'm glad there is a fix planned for the quirk you describe. Thank you for that explanation.
I see your point. Maybe Gary Johnson would have won if all Trump and Clinton voters countered each other :)
I'd upvote this whole exchange, but that seems like a lot of work. :-D