RE: People Rank - Using Page Rank Algorithm for Better Curation and Rewards
There is often a lot of piling to a relatively small number of posts, I'll agree with that. But the reason is not the curation rewards, it is something else.
People upvote what they think is important. Most people are not often optimizing their curation rewards, including myself.
Our discussion of curation rewards is most for identifying vulnerabilities that can be gamed.
Nevertheless the curation reward incentive (or the misunderstanding of it) is apparently driving the initial stage of the groupthink where those who do try to optimize their curation rewards and frontrun whales try to get in early on voting for blog posts. Then this boosts visibility and thus boosting votes (helping to get the crucial whale attention thus somewhat self-fulfilling) from those who vote on what they think is important.
Also I think much of the groupthink has to do with an inherent groupthink in interests of those who are on the site and have significant voting power. Most of us are coming from affiliation with Bitcoin or in the same household with someone who was into Bitcoin.
I think we need actual surveys of users as to why they vote on things. To be honest, I can only use anecdotes and I think everyone else is pretty much doing the same.
The dollarvigilante "joke" post is a prime example. 800 or so upvotes isn't because they thought it was a valuable post. It wasn't that funny, it wasn't that informative. It would be nice to know what so many thought was worthy of upvotes. Were some upvoting in protest of the downvotes? Fanboism? We are all guessing on these matters.
Anyway, thanks for your comments. I've seen you around for awhile and enjoy your input.
That but I think more that the way he responded with some degree of willingness to change and also how he better explained his background and admitted some of his mistakes. There was some (modicum of) humility. Thus he gamed some sympathy vote for the @berniesanders downvote. Community likes to see progress. That was likely considered important progress and upbeat.