I am not sure how many actually read the whitepaper. I see a lot of talk about abuse and how to "stop" it etc but in many ways I view that as fighting against the stream of a river. You can fight it all you want and get nowhere, or you can harness it and use it.
First for a section of the whitepaper that I think many should very much keep in mind.
Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse”the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
I also find this concept important to keep in mind.
The impact of this voting and payout distribution is to offer large bounties for good content while still rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribution. The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people overestimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.
I think an informed user is the best kind of user and the concepts above actually help put the system in perspective as to how it was designed and thought out.
To quote DMX "Always know the rules of the game before you play it"