People will only sacrifice money for friendship while the trade-off is marginal.

Each dolphin individual in that "community" will be sacrificing several hundred thousand dollars a year by handing out upvotes to his "friends" (as I wrote in my last post) .

Most humans do not value online friendship so dearly, so I would wager instead what you will see are communities being formed among minnow users to pool upvotes, once individuals have grown to dolphin size they will exit these communities.

You might argue that they're all making money from voting on each other's material, but no material would have to be produced, and they could make much more, simply by leveraging their SP hoards.