I still don't know why you think that way. I'm sure it's that I have simply missed where you've agrued that. I have seen where you've vaguely referred to game theory (in response to someone else's comment on the subject), but, for whatever reason, my lack of time to read everything, whatever, I still haven't seen your reasoning.

Why is it even necessary to incentivize early voting? It's not done on any other successful social platform - and they're all monetized - it's just a different form of compensation, like psychic rewards, for example. Everyone loves to see their contribution receive tons of Likes, but why the need to rush that process by skewing their early value? And with the horrible results we have as a consequence?

Might you dedicate a full post to the community laying out your reasoning on this? It's a fairly central issue.

We also have the extremely closely related issue of vote value payout that increases with the vote count on a post, which ultimately exacerbates the negative feedback loop: as people rush to vote on whatever is still under the threashold (2 hours as is suggested here) and they settle for what's still available (those following this particular game theory maximization strategy, that is), which is something that comes from only 8.33% of an entire day's worth of posting, whatever mediocre post that happens to be there gets launched and then becomes a high vote count candidate. 8.33% of a day's posting doesn't give someone from Australia much to choose from. Good thing though that there are not a lot of users from Australia, so that very likely mediocre post doesn't make trending. It goes without saying that the opposite happens in the U.S. because the user base is much larger and the post goes trending, forever how bad it is! People log on and first look for something under the 2 hour limit, find the best thing still available, and the "pile on" begins. And all the while, that quality post from 4 hours ago languishes. People are "gaming", not "curating". And to make matters worse, that gaming continues as the vote count increases! That's how we end up with the trending pages we've got.

Two very related issues, that really are one.

And then there's a third, that really is part of the one. The present payout structure not only causes all of the above mentioned negatives, it also completely decimates comments, i.e., engagement, in the process, since low vote count comment votes are skewed exactly opposite to the "pile on" vote reward skewing.

Might you dedicate a full post to the community on these three (this one) subject, laying out your comprehensive reasoning? What is your opinion about equally weighted rewards for everyone, posts AND comments, regardless of when the vote is cast, AND why do you hold that opinion? Would that be possible?

I think it's pretty crucial to our success. In fact my last two post focus exclusively on this.
@cryptographic/further-elucidation-and-an-example
@cryptographic/forget-about-exceptionality-on-hive

I've argued my case. ;-)

Edit: there are some interesting suggestions in the comments of those posts (not to be taken as 100%, one sided possibilities, but as ideas leading to possible synthesis.)