STEEMIT---VOTING Collusion

 While  cooperation to distribute funds to the best work is the desired goal, collusion that undermines this objective should be minimized. There are two kinds of collusion , the most straightforward is when one user simply buys a larger stake than others, and the other involves coordinating a large number of smaller stakeholders to work together. Larger stakeholders can have the voting influence of 100 or even 1000 smaller stakeholders which means they have even greater incentive to defect by voting for themselves than they had under a linear distribution. 

 Regardless of how much money any one individual has, there are always many other individuals with similar wealth. Even the wealthiest individual rarely has much more than the next couple wealthiest combined. Furthermore, those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy.

 Fortunately, any work that is getting a large concentration of votes is also gaining the most scrutiny (publicity). Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders. Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves. In fact, honest large stakeholders are likely to be more effective by policing abuse and using negative voting than they would be by voting for smaller contributions. 

 The use of negative-voting to keep people from abusing the system leverages the crab mentality that many people have when it is perceived that one individual is profiting at the expense of everyone else. While crab mentality normally refers to short-sighted people keeping good people down, it is also what allows good people to keep bad people down. 

 The only “problem” with crab mentality is when people wrongly believe someone is profiting at everyone else's expense.