I'm wondering if you're missing the meaning of the curve. The curve shows how a post's reward is calculated as a function of how much stake is voting for it. It does not show an account's voting strength as a function of its stake.
What the linear curve would do is redistribute rewards from highly-voted posts to less-highly-voted posts. I don't think it would have much impact on low-voted posts (I could be wrong, I haven't run the numbers). It would just require a little more stake for a post to get off the ground, so to speak.
Define highly-voted posts please
Top 15 trending.
I know that it is stake weighted but how does this feature discourage self voting? Someone with a large stake will just upvote himself and even benefit from the curve since he has a lot of stake.
Sorry I'm late to answer this, and maybe someone else has already done so. The point is to discourage self-voting for garbage posts. If a post is worth something, of course it should be self-voted.
But if the post is garbage, the philosophy is to make sure that if the author is the only voter that he will have wasted his vote. Thus, you want the author reward curve to be steeper on the right than on the left. The way it's done in the current implementation is that at the far left (when the post hasn't received any votes yet), the curve is a straight upward-sloping line; after about 400 Mvests are voting for it, the curve starts to bend upwards.
The proposal in this post is to make the curve start out completely flat and gradually bend upwards until it's a straight line. Both discourage self-voting in the same way: they make sure that a post needs a little "oomph" to get off the ground, so to speak.
A post with little weight on it doesn't make it garbage.
The calculation is based on voting weight , it doesn't calculate how many vote were on a post, it calculates the weight.
Someone who want to upvote himself is going to upvote regardless of any oomph. This feature doesn't discourage selfvoting at all, it actually encourages people to buy more steem power to self vote themselves.
I don't get it. If you're going to ignore my explanation why ask for it in the first place?
Your explanation of how the curve work is spot on, but this doesn't discourage self voting. It makes self voting less profitable for low SP account and more profitable for large SP account but doesn't discourage anyone .
It doesn't show it directly, but indirectly there is a similar effect because the most powerful accounts always "live" on the right side of the curve (they themselves can put a post there, so the only question becomes how far out to the right it goes) and the least powerful move between the right and left depending on the actions of the most powerful (in a sense this could be viewed as another way the most powerful have even more power).
Flattening the curve on posts flattens the power imbalance between accounts as one of its effects (or at least no longer amplifies it)