Why would an author do that? The author gets the same regardless in the new rules. The curator voting incentives also don't change. The only thing is that authors are going to get 25% taken away guaranteed rather than getting a possible bonus for early votes.
I know why that's not so desirable from the perspective of distribution, and we can talk about that part, because I still think that I like the penalty for early self voters. I certainly was taking full advantage of that when I self voted and botted.
I'm now finding the thread between you and @timcliff so I might pop a few words there. That one will be less about the author and more about the effects of the early window penalty itself.
This won't be true. Both sophisticated voters and curation min-maxers will make decisions on which post to vote for based on how much value their vote can give to the post vs the pool, which will be lower for any post that has early votes.
Setting up so that voters have to make that decision also makes voting immensely more complicated.
It's definitely a big advantage for people who know how to do it. I push that hard myself. But if we're going to remove it, we should remove it by making it equally desirable to have votes at any time, not less desirable to have early votes.
I can get on board such a solution, that's for sure. But I don't see how.
Oh about the other part, I forgot the author is voting too (too focused on the not self voting part haha....). I'm not really that concerned about that extra stake coming from the author to begin with though.
How does the situation change for curation min maxers though? It seems only to change for the author.
(Edit: Oh yes of course. Those that wanted part of their vote to go to the author to begin with. Yes that is true.)
One way to do it is just assign the full 25% across the successful curators. You can keep the early voting penalty if you really want it. Take all the money you would be giving to the pool and add it to the curation reward pool of the post instead. This allows early votes to encourage later votes a little bit but not nearly as much.
Because the total curation reward for a post that has early votes will still be less, their curation rewards per vote will be substantially more on posts that get the full 25% because all the votes came in after fifteen. It doesn't really change a lot for them from the way it is now, but authors will want to encourage more curation rewards and thus more votes because the early votes don't benefit them anymore.
But I don't think people will change how early they vote because they aren't all going to agree to cast their votes all after fifteen minutes. The only thing that matters for a curator min maxxer is value currently on post, and expected total value of post. I suppose the latter might change a little bit, but it's hard to say exactly how.
(Re: equalizing, I think it should be more in that direction as well. Sqrt curve is pretty brutal)
It's not expected total value of post, it's (expected total value of post * percent paid out as curation). People already do this: I've seen my curation autovoters move around or leave based on how many early votes I buy. But right now I don't care because the early votes give me so much value. In the new system it's to my advantage to get as many of those people onboard as possible, and when the votes come in doesn't matter to my payout, so I want as few early votes as I can get.
Ah, not according to my reading of the code. The vote penalty is done on the votes themselves.
Whatever the numerical value displayed on the post, 25% gets shaved off and sent to curator payout processing. The penalty applies to what a curator would have gotten.
So I don't think it changes your strategy, at least if I'm right (goes to read it again...)
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The total curation payout on a post now can be as low as 10% because of early votes; a lot of mine are in the 13% range. Right now the extra chunk goes to the author, and in the new system it will go to the pool. It would be better if it went to the curators.
It also leads to an amusing passive-aggressive thing where I can reduce the curation rewards on other people's posts by voting on them early, or reduce the expected curation rewards voters see on other people's posts by voting on them early and then unvoting in the last 12 hours. Still thinking about whether/how I want to deploy that one. My vote isn't very big, but it's big enough to skew the curation rewards significantly, especially if no one votes for 15 minutes after.
Even funnier, if you want to hurt the collective profitability of a big bot and its user, up to a certain point it will be more effective to minute-zero upvote the post you expect to get botted than to downvote.