Yeah, so it turns out you can't give everyone a free lambo with linear rewards and then quadruple the Dank Amps (rewards) of those mega votes without consequences. In this case we're watching the rewards pool drain.
Definition
auto-self
vo- vote
rotic- sexy time
Asphiyxiation- Death by lack of air
What we're doing
We're literally strangling ourselves right now. The Circle Jerk was sooo huge that it's just started eating the rewards pool. That first day when we were giving $8K to some of the biggest authors is more akin to promising them like 7% of the rewards pool, but we did it to multiple authors, and everyone else was making more, so we promised more than 100% of the rewards pool that day. So, it drained.
@me-tarzan and his reward pool tracking
That image is from his post this week of - https://steemit.com/steemit/@me-tarzan/rewards-pool-i-have-charted-the-waters-for-you-june-27-2017
As you can see the reward pool is going down. Look at the slope of that curve.
(@me-tarzan Thanks for tracking that. I should probably ask you about including it here, but I'm also promoting you and your post. I'm a little unclear on the ethics. HMU if you feel robbed by me in addition to robbed by the pool)
My rewards were shrinking after my post earned
That slope remind you of any other? Oh, shit. It looks kinda looks like the drain on the reward pool! Correlation isn't causation, but I'm going out on a limb and saying what I'm seeing are linked.
So, what happens next?
What happens next is that the reward pool is going to drain until it reaches equilibrium with the speed with which these mega votes are draining it. It'll look like the post rewards in trending and other places have stabilized and are now lower (/cheer) but what has happened is the biggest giveaway to already rich posters and that much given to them has lowered the rewards of everyone else and will continue to do so until it stabilizes more (/stopcheeringandcryinside).
Funs over everyone. Go back to where you were before. Yes your minnow vote is worth more, but with the pool drained by the top posters it's gonna even out and ultimately not really help you. Sorry your views are down, sorry you can't vote on more than 10 things a day without draining your voting power, and sorry this may have killed your inter-minnow communication thing too. But we handed out a lot of steem to the richest among us and biggest users among us. So it was all worth it!
It's gonna look like a victory cause trending is down, but we just handed a lot higher of a percent to the biggest authors of what is now a much smaller pool for everyone. I think I remember reading someone suggesting there might be issues with this HF and some unintended consequences of it...
Side note Curation and Comments are up!!!
Hey, well at least here's a victory everyone will agree is a great thing. Commenting has gone up TWOFOLD since this hardfork. People are now actively commenting more and literally twice as much of the reward pool is going there.
It's probably just self voting and stealing more from all of us
Yeah, so you noticed all those $100+ comments peeps are spraying all over themselves now? Yeah... well it turns out that drains the pool too. Pretty sure we didn't all miraculously decide to love one another's posts more and spend twice as much in the comments section on someone else. We're now just mooning our own comments. So, sad panda on that. Seems like giving everyone the ability to free lambo the shit out of themselves didn't do as much for balanced curation as we were promised.
A radical idea
Can we go back to 40 votes for starters? It seems part, if not all of this, was a bad idea. I remember someone saying something about this being a bad idea before I got here too... Here's some perspective from the white paper (@dantheman).
In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner. For example a quadratic function in votes, i.e., someone with twice the votes of someone else should receive four times the payout and someone with three times the votes should receive nine times the payout. In other words, the reward is proportional to votes2rather than votes. This mirrors the value of network effect which grows with n2the number of participants, according to Metcalfe’s Law
Assuming all users have equal stake, someone who only receives their own vote will receive much less than someone who receives votes from 100 different users. This encourages users to cooperate to vote for the same things to maximize the payout. This system also creates financial incentive to collude where everyone votes on one thing and then divides the reward equally among themselves.
Other than that Everything IS AWESOME!!!!
We ultimately have a distribution problem. Back end hacking linear rewards was meant to fix that. It appears to have worked out well in some ways and had some pretty crappy consequences in others
Vote for @aggroed for witness.