RE: Assume a can opener -- A critique of the snowflake plan
1- I don't think I ever mentionned whales voting for same authors or bandwagoning being a problem. Essentially what I said is that curation rewards encourages bot voting.
And I agree with you that curation rewards are not inherently bad, as long as they encourage natural voting these rewards poses no problem at all. I've been thinking about a system for curation rewards that would be different but it's not easy, I thought about using an average of all post instead of rewards for each post and also have some sort of limitation on rewards but even this has a lot of abuse issue.
2-
However, for this system to work, the moderator whales in question would have to be willing to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to subject all posts and comments on steemit to this level of scrutiny.
A lot of the moderation would be done by bots, moderators could set up all kind of differents filters to spot sybil behavior. Like I mentionned in my post there would also be a report button.
Another thing is that a downvote is basically an upvote to the system as a whole instead of being a targeted upvote. So if moderators sees something that deserve more reward they could simply downvote something that they think do not deserve it, that will effectively increase reward on that post.
3- I disagree. If all rewards are completely removed from users, moderators would have very little incentives to split their account. Also the more moderators do actually split the more inflation will be given to the ones who don't , so essentially moderators who don't split will build up more and more power to counter a sybil attempt.
4- Is a valid concern, @timcliff suggested that moderators would be able to upvote to counter abusive downvoting from other moderators, they would be able to upvote to bring the post back to where it was before the downvote but not beyond.
I realize this. My point was that these voting patterns exist in spite of a significant curation reward penalty. That is to say, not every voting pattern can be attributed to a desire for curation rewards. You assume people bot vote because of curation rewards. And you might even be right. But you have not proven it.
SO these bots exist right now, or theyre just electric can openers? Cheetah is moderately good at detecting the most obvious sort of abuse, but for the most part right now, we find abuse with human eyeballs.
Its not a question of power (they don't have to build it up they already have more than sufficient power in the system you describe), its a question of the will to use that power. And the acuity of discernment to be able to see most of the places where it needs to be used.
fair enough that seems like an OK way to address that.