RE: An entry-level look at quadratic vs linear rewards
Good explanation. Unfortunately I just missed out on seeing Quadratic rewards in action, having joined in July 2017.
The first thing I'll say is that ANY system is going to be gamed to advantage. We may have bid bots and vote selling services now, but for quadratic rewards we'll just see that same phenomenon take new form via curation trails.
You make a good point about flagging to rein in those big undeserving whale posts, but there is currently a stigma against flagging and I can see an abusive whale threatening retaliation and capping the rewards (very cheaply) of anyone flagging their overpaid content. So it would need a separation of accounts for serious steemians - an author account where you create and engage, and a curation account where you hold your SP and reward or flag other content, without producing any of your own that could be retaliated against. It's even possible that whales could easily decide to cap ANY post rewards that got too high so that they can still claim a higher stake of the reward pool via middling posts.
That said I would like to see quadratic rewards in action. Maybe there will be a way via SMTs to create a platform token which uses quadratic rewards and we can run quadratic and linear rewards side-by-side.
Very insightful.
There's also a possibility that a competitor may fork the chain or start their own.
It'd be interesting to see which direction the users would go, given the choice.
STEEM definitely still has first mover advantage so they'd really have to screw up to be seriously damaged by a fork. It's hard to predict the future in this space though :)