$20 payout turns to $15.I wish I had an article handy for you, but there are lots of types of reward pool abuse (I apologize if this is already something you know). Most tie in to the concept laid out by @dan (hopefully, he will correct me if I'm wrong here LOL) called inflation. Inflation is the effect that the reward pool is constantly changing as more users have a stake in the pool. Whales have the largest stake in the pool and in normal conditions they are unaffected by inflation. It would take a lot of users to reduce a whale's stake; however, for a minnow like me, it's a huge deal. I see it on payout day when my
@grumpycat (and others) deal with this by downvoting. If you downvote enough users, their rewards will return to the pool and cancel out that inflation (in theory). This is where it becomes abuse, whales then self-vote returning the rewards to themselves. Inflation returns only now a whale just got richer.