Suppose Alice and Bob each have 1000 SP. Alice votes 5 times a day and Bob votes 40 times a day. Should Bob get eight times as much influence and eight times as many curation rewards as Alice, or should the system give these two users an equal voice?
Excellent question and the answer seems not as clear as the post suggests. Bob is investing more effort than Alice.
What about two people with 1000 SP, one of whom signs on every day and votes 40 times, the other is absent for a year, signs on and votes once? Conceptually, the bucket model says they should have equal influence, assuming a large enough bucket (the current parameters don't allow a year of course, but they do equalize because more- and less-absent users). I think they should not have the same influence.
Well I think the argument here would be that the one who invests more time will have read/compared more posts, giving him an advantage when evaluating which ones he should invest the most voting power in. In both cases the optimal move is to upvote 5 posts (due to superlinearity). If you spend more time curating, you increase your sample size and are more likely to upvote only good content.
I agree that the edge one gets from spending more time on the site is most likely diminished, but it should still be there.