Fair point, I missed that.
So I gave it a lot of thought.
If you decide to split your power you need a small vote early (curation) and big vote late (upvote) - you cant manipulate stuff the other way around.
Dream scenario is you curate a post, noone else does, you will have 10%. What is your play? Do you wait for others to vote "knowing" you drop a fat upvote later? That means getting your big money in when way behind (too late and into weakened pool). In practice, you just drop the upvote fast and hope to go big from there (worst case: noone else votes and you get average score) or refrain from upvoting at all - no late voting either way. (Well, maybe you find it profitable just before payout if noone upvotes but the late vote hammer didnt do any good for the post)
Usually a few others curate with you. Now it comes down to judging whether the total payout makes it high enough to give good return on upvote. Your share of the curation pool is only going to matter if you estimate the decision to be close.
So you pass up on upvoting some of your curations. What do you do with these votes? Find something you considered curating and passed up? That only makes sense if it is dead zero in curation (wont happen). Unfortunately, your best play is to find stuff that was overcurated (and upvote it asap - you either get early on a viral post or you get huge share of the 40% pool when few others upvote - at curators' expense). Maybe you will be able to find some overcurated-underupvoted stuff near payouts too - not the kind of late upvotes to be useful (again).
To me, insta-upvoting highly curated stuff seems to be the most profitable option so the bots are going that way (curation not being necessary). Fast forward few weeks, noone is splitting their votes. There are upvoting bots crushing the regular users in the upvote pool because they vote faster (so the current fast voting penalty has to be reintroduced for the upvote pool). Meanwhile, in the curation pool, the best results are produced by curation bots throwing around lots of small votes on questionable posts fishing for scooping full (or maybe half/third) curation pool if the post happens to get some upvotes from FFF crowd (Friends/Fools/Family).
Even if I am wrong about the black-hat curation strategy, curation bots have a great advantage over manual curators because they can always make their decision at the very end of the curation window, acting on much better info about the amount of votes during curation period (way more important piece of info compared to the system I referenced)
So in my mind experiment, the artificial split introduces a df almost noone uses and it still breaks the system by incetivising destructive behaviour on both sides of the pool.
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis.
If I understand your analysis correctly, the biggest manipulation via self-playing with split votes is 50% curation reward instead of 40%, which is same as linear reward. If they want to go that route they can just early and late vote random comments and snag the 50%. Maybe that's not a bad thing? That being the case, police bots could easily search out those and dilute them. Or maybe let whales forfeit voting rights in exchange for 50% auto reward and 50% spread across all author rewards.
Some will still try to game other people's votes, but it seems to me that the incentive to do that goes down (relative to current protocol) because the late voting bots are contributing only 10% to the nonlinear pool instead of 50%.
What keeps a large stakeholder (today) from authoring a random comment via a separate account then posting an early vote from yet a different account, then posting a large last minute upvote.
Wouldn’t that gain the person 100% of his voted rewards? And couldn’t that all be done by a bot?