We are actively looking for ways to reduce whale influence and bad behavior. So far the best solution we have identified is to remove curation rewards all together. The existence of curation rewards does the following for whales:
- encourages reckless voting because the rate of return on voting on random comments is very high for the whale. Effectively, the whale spends $100 of community money and pockets $25. The $75 cost is socialized, but the $25 is privatized.
- the probability of being early on popular "good" content and getting an even higher rate of return is not higher than the "sure thing" of any random thing a whale could vote on.
- any attempt to impose per-account caps will result in sybil attacks
- good whales must vote as prolifically as evil whales or the evil whales will overcome them.
- any attempt to implement stake delegation for voting purposes is disincentivized by the curation reward algorithm unless curation rewards propagate back. This backward propagation is both difficult to implement and ultimately irrelevant considering points 2.
In other words, the curation reward system may be fundamentally broken and should be discarded. Once the curation rewards are discarded, then whales face no opportunity cost by not voting.
RE: Whale’s dilemma