In earlier versions what you say is true. It was confusing users.
It is entirely possible for comments to be more highly valued than the parent. This frequently happens when the parent copies something without citing the source and then people upvote the comment that provides the original source.
Nothing keeps people honest like rewarding the person who reveals the cheater.
Dan, how does it feel to have this much power? Your single vote just bumped this guy from $0 to $26. I'm trying to stay classy and resist the urge to beg you for votes...
huge responsibility, i think. Every step could give live or death in terms of social networking) It is more interesting: does whales downvoted anyone? And how downvote influence at all on reward and visibility?
@usefree, @biophil, @dantheman, Does anyone know of any discussion (if there is something in the whitepaper I'll be reading it in a few hours) of how the steemit platform might become more balanced with respect to the seemingly disproportionate influence that founders and early adopters currently possess?
Is steemit designed in a way whereby someone with a lot of steem power would need to continue to make positive contributions in order to retain their influence?
I looked at Dan's wallet (https://steemit.com/@dantheman/transfers) and was wondering what balances (his steem, steem power, steem dollars, or some combination of these) resulted in my post being bumped $26. Is there a formula that can be used to calculate how much value a particular person's vote will increase a post?
In short, it's his Steem Power that did it. You should check out the whitepaper for the best description, but the very simplest basics are that it's a quadratic formula: your influence goes as your SP squared. There's quite a bit more to it than that, but that's the gist.
[This is actually a reply to biophil's post above with the whitepaper link. Steemit wasn't displaying a "Reply" link below biophil's post (a bug?) so I'm just replying to my own parent reply. Edit: I think the reason the "Reply" link was missing was because I upvoted biophil's post.]
Thanks for the link to the whitepaper @biophil, I've downloaded it and will read it in a few hours.
In reply to all of your recent comments,
I think you can only reply so many deep. I don't know why they designed it that way.
As for the issue of how to reduce the relative influence of founders and early adopters, I don't think there is an explicit mechanism for that. From what I've gathered, they're expecting it to even out organically; as more and more people come into the system, more and more SP is distributed, and the people with big balances end up wielding less relative power. I'm a bit skeptical, but I'm participating nonetheless.