Steem Experiments: do small early votes still change the curation amount?
I was a little astonished by something @carlgnash put in his post about HF20 and the early voting penalty earlier today (bolding mine):
These are not surprising findings. Low SP users do not gain any benefit at all from a self-vote at 0 minutes if their vote amount is less than the dust threshold. The more SP a user is voting with, the greater the opportunity to take advantage of the increased rewards available from current self-voting at 0 minute behavior.
The last sentence is true, although the ability to buy votes makes it much less important than Carl is making it out to be. But the idea of the bolded sentence was completely new to me, and I was pretty sure from what I've seen in testing that it was incorrect. I know, as I think we all know, that small votes still accrue curation rewards, and that curation reward has to go somewhere. (Curation rewards below 0.001 SP do go to dust, but that dust goes into the same category as the EVP; currently to the author, presumably burned in HF20.)
But rather than reasoning from theory, I thought that was reasonable enough to test. I have an account with a 1c vote and no autovoters: @blueox, a bot that I've set up to upvote Minnesotans. (If you're a Minnesotan and you want it to vote you, let me know. It's only using about half its votes right now.) So I made a post and immediately self-voted it with that account.
I then got a tiny vote from a user who wasn't listening, but it wasn't enough to move the payout above $0.01, so we're still in dust territory.
At 30 minutes @introduce.bot came along and voted it 2c, but that should be outside the penalty area.
Then at 31 minutes I voted it $0.21 from this account.
Fortunately SteemWorld calculates rewards including the penalty, so we don't have to wait for payout to see how it does:
You can see that of $0.24 of vote value on the post, $0.19 is going to the author. We can calculate this simply as SBD*2 because Steemworld doesn't adjust for the debt ratio causing some of the liquid payout to be in Steem.
This ratio would be impossible if the early vote penalty was not being applied and going to the author. So we can confirm that early votes do still have this effect even if they are small.
Oh yes, the sqrt curation curve distinctly allows for grabbing a significant chunk of the total curation with smaller VP, so this result is not surprising to me. Good to see though.
There's something in HF20 about dust handling that's different too, I remember something about shaving off a little VP off every vote, I wonder if that was just my imagination...
In summary, self-upvotes are still a good thing, no matter the SP level?
That's good. Just getting rid of being able to self-upvote would still be a good thing though.
Your post or comment would still need to exceed the dust vote level. So a self vote, and a few purchased votes to get to the payout level.
Purchased or earned votes.
Yes very true. And a person could self vote and then look at day five and if no earned votes, then they could buy just enough to get the reward. (doing on day 6 would get some of the prickly picky people upset)
@Dustsweeper comes in handy for this as well.
Hmmmm...interesting. Thanks for the analysis and the solid info.
I figured they would still apply. After all, even if it's only a small amount, it's still taking something. That's cool you're able to run these tests for real.
I'm tempted to do one that's botted up just to show how effective even a 1c vote can be. The curation algorithm is weighted really heavily toward the first voter, and that's going to become more obvious once that's not the author the vast majority of the time.
Well, the bigger players and those who are buying a lot of votes to get to the top of trending will probably still self-vote right away.
I wonder if there's a strategy where you would upvote someone's post to attack them. Hmm. I wonder if that means the larger accounts are going to start upvoting many people at 0 minutes with a small vote so more of the overall rewards go to the rewards pool (themselves, in other words). Or is that too convoluted?