RE: The Steemit Tragedy of The Commons
The real issue is that not much curation is actually happening.
Minnows vote - but mostly because they want a reciprocal vote, it is a way of getting attention. They can't deliver any monetary value with their votes. The whales vote for about 20 authors all the time, and no-one else. And the growing dolphin class don't bother at all. They could deliver a few cents to writers, and it would add up if lots of them did it - but they feel they don't get much curation award from it, so why bother - they are better off spending all their time writing for the whale-bots.
Ideally you would have the dolphin class do a lot of curation just to ensure the health of the system - but maybe they think it will fail anyway, so why bother, focus on writing as much as possible and reaping the awards.
Right, there are simply not enough dolphins, and there is simply not a good enough incentive for dolphins to 'properly' curate content.
Why should a dolphin upvote some article, when they could instead use the vote power to upvote an article they know whales will upvote, and thus give a massive curation reward?
Then indeed, they move on to trying to reap rewards... causing a selfish behaviour.. and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.
Exactly... I feel that it is a game and i am losing it right from the start. I am a lousy gamer.