This is a very basic model why it would be in the best interest for curators to collude together to suppress Whale votes. There has been discussion of stopping bot accounts to be run by whales. Whenever there is talk of stopping something, I always wonder what is their payoff. I decided to set up simple model to try and figure this out.
Model
- Ten cuarators and 4 authors.
- Three experiments
- Arbitrary voting
- Removal of Whale voting
- Whale avoidance - do not vote on post that Whale votes on
- Payout is in a unit of 1
Analysis
- Consistent with power law in payout.
- Curators see a huge increase in payout, except Whale. Balance payouts for top vote authors.
- No appreciable change in payout either for curators or authors
Conclusion
Experiment 1 and Experiment 3 do not have any significant change in payouts. Experiment 3 really as no incentive to avoid whale votes either curators or authors.
In Experiment 2, we see that curators increase their upside potential in payout, including minnows. Authors can receive an increase of payout, but at the expense of capping some of their upside payout. It is understandable that curators would prefer to suppress the whale's vote. They would be economically motivated to do it.
At some point curators will become whales. What will you do then? I believe you will then leave the system which would decrease the value of the network. A death spiral would ensue.
This model in no way is trying to model the Steemit network, but would be a first step in understanding the rationals that come from proposals in changing the activities on steemit. A more comprehensive study would include iterating this model over time with much larger amount of authors and curators.
