What a great guy. Sean-king upvoted my post above. Note I had added to the end of that comment post. I think I made a very important point there about voting not being free of mental computational cost.
Edit: I added even more to the end of that comment post:
The curator rewards are such a small fraction of the voters Steem Power, that only those with significant Steem Power are economically motivated by curator rewards. Thus we could posit that minnow voters have no great mental calculation cost when voting since they can vote their conscience without significant curator reward implications. Although the minnows dont individually have much impact on the payout rewards, collectively they do since there are many more of them than there are whales. Thus we can conclude the white paper is more or less correct w.r.t. to minnows and w.r.t. to whales, the votes are not a replacement for micropayments because the whales vote doesnt involve an insignificant economics value.
I've concluded the minnows always can vote their conscience and ditto the largest whales, yet the problem remains that the dominant game theory is the most upvoted posts will also attract the most upvotes in a vortex of one-size-fits-all:
https://steemit.com/gametheory/@biophil/what-s-a-minnow-to-do-the-game-theory-of-steem-part-4#@anonymint/re-biophil-re-anonymint-re-biophil-what-s-a-minnow-to-do-the-game-theory-of-steem-part-4-20160719t212322332zAgain the solution appears to be the one I blogged about which earned me $7000:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/improving-steem-s-rankings-to-cater-to-diverse-content-preferences
This is already a phenomenon seen all over social media. Look at Twitter, for example, where the only metrics of success are likes and retweets. Even there, content is dominated by garbage "parody" accounts, who all repost the same stuff. Why are these accounts the most popular? Well, on a platform like Twitter, people are rewarded via followers and notifications for playing a part of the majority. It's the same reason why you only see conservative view points ridiculed and progressive ones hailed. The best content strays too far from the norm to make up the most exposed content.
You can see this everywhere. Hell, look at top movie lists. The Shawshank Redemption routinely lands #1 on user generated lists that consist of voting for what you like. So does Pulp Fiction. Are these the best two movies ever? No, they aren't. So why do they always land on top? Because they are the goodest. Everyone likes these movies. It may not be everyone's favorite, but everyone likes it.
I was rewarded $7000 for proposing an algorithmic solution to the problem you lament: