Nice post! I found it because I happened to be watching my bot's console at the time, and I saw the message
Curation already spent; no vote for @liberosist/op-ed-how-curation-guilds-have-turned-voting-behaviour-on-its-head
Your post scored high on my bot's payout-predictor model, but then at the last minute it decided not to vote for you because you had already received too many votes.
All that to say, my vote for you was manual. :)
You should teach your bot to vote a bit earlier in such cases )
Maybe. I'm going to write a big long article about that issue if I ever have time. In some cases, it's worse to vote earlier; my bot's philosophy is "better safe than sorry."
That brings me to a possible concern. What if due to this new found focus on voting content with fewer votes; some authors receive less rewards than usual? If you hadn't caught my post manually, I wouldn't have got your vote and all the other bots that follow you. I suppose that makes sense for now, but it'll be interesting to see how things play out were there to be multiples of thousands of posts every day!
Yeah, I've thought about that too. At some point I'm going to do an in-depth study and write a big article about this, but I bet that a huge majority of votes (90% wouldn't surprise me) are currently suboptimal in some egregious way, mostly from voting too late.
In the end it will all come down to how the incentives are structured; there's no reason the incentives couldn't be redesigned to stop pushing everybody to spread their votes out.
If someone receives more, there will be someone who receives less, since the reward pool is the same.
Of course, but I'm talking about individual votes here rather than the overall network.