Making the dolphins the new whales (temporarily) is essentially the purpose of the experiment from what I understand. The whales who don't participate are being countered by other whales downvotes.
As far as implementing something like this as a HF, that would be a huge and extremely controversial change. A lot more data (via experiments like this) would be needed before making a change that significant to the actual platform.
Also, if this was a long-term thing, that wouldn't work either. If whales are able to power down, and then power up lots of little accounts - they could still act as whales and go unnoticed.
Counter voting for the purpose of this experiment is a terrible idea. As most authors won't get the memo nor care, they'll just see the downvotes and the zapping of rewards that could have been.
I'm not sure what the data of dolphins being the new whales will show. It certainly wouldn't show the likely impact of limiting voting vests.
But oh well... let's see how this pans out.
This is one in a long list...but is precisely the most obvious point. It also makes a mockery of the initial premise. Wtf is sp for if our community promotes people with more than someone else flagging others legitimate content?
Either upvote it or not.
This experiment will not even provide us with an untainted dataset!
There is a separate conversation to be had about downvoting in general. Even without this experiment, there are tons of users that are downvoting to counter other people's votes. (Dan is doing it, Bernie is doing it, Smooth is doing it..)
There is still a lot of disagreement over it, but the general consensus is that anyone is allowed to upvote/downvote however they chose. It is their SP, and if they want to use it to cancel someone else's vote - that is entirely within their right as a SP holder.
I do not know what the goals of the experiment are. I would imagine that after all the dust settles from the initial drama over people getting downvoted, the dolphins and minnows may actually enjoy the platform quite a bit more for the duration of the experiment. Personally, I like how my upvote can actually make a few cents of difference now.
I know it's been said before, but this would be a lot different conversation if this was something permanent. Obviously this would not be fair to the main stakeholders of the platform, and I suspect most of them would power down and either cash out, or power up a bunch of little accounts to get around it.
Since it is a temporary experiment, I see the potential harm as fairly minimal.
See my post tonite on all this, it is also in this list of comments. Nite guys