I really don't know what purpose this is supposed to serve.

Perhaps if every whale had come to an agreement not to use their flags for a fixed 48 hour period, then we could see some results that mattered. For some reason though, this experiment has been started by only a few whales.

I am ecstatic that people are making the effort to improve upon some of the issues here on Steemit, but there is no point doing so if it is not going to be done properly.

Two wrongs don't make a right, and they certainly don't make for more accurate data.

At the moment, the fact that not every whale has committed to the experiment is being addressed by downvoting any posts that have been upvoted by a whale.

This would perhaps make sense, if every whale had the exact same amount of STEEM Power, but they do not, and so this is not helping the results at all.

Also, the "counterbalancing" of whale votes is being executed terribly. I had one of my first decent payouts in over a month, thanks to a vote by one of the founders, and my reward for writing an article worthy of 16 resteems and an upvote from Dan, is to receive not one, but four whale downvotes in an effort to "balance" things up. My reputation takes a hit because I posted a good piece? Lol.

It's good to help, but if you're going to try, do it properly. The results of this little experiment will tell us nothing, because the data is tainted. Plenty of whales have voted and the downvotes only corrupt the payouts further.

Advice

If I were you, I would go out of your way not to write a brilliant piece until this experiment is over, for if you do, it may earn a whale vote, proceeded by several whale flags that will leave you worse off than before you posted anything.

Go for a mediocre post that isn't quite special enough to garner a whale vote, and you may do a lot better.

One final thing, is that all this lack of whale voting does is give people with bots and sock-puppet accounts as much power as the whales had, so this sort of experiment shouldn't even be conducted until that issue has been addressed.