This a common misconception.
I was aware of the before and after weighting of curation rewards.
A low SP holder gets nothing for voting on a post after a whale. The system works to reward people for voting before the whales on popular posts.
They can frontrun the whales. They can study what the whales like to vote for. It is the circlejerk effect so many people are mentioning.
I did it. I voted Jeff's posts early and earned outsized curation rewards when the whales voted later.
Also many minions may not realize they have to vote before, so they vote any way, because some whales did.
Also the pact knows what they are going to vote on, so there is no guessing involved.
If you're a whale with say $0.5m- $1m worth of SP, it makes no sense to think like a small time hustler and indulging in nefarious activities for a few thousand extra dollars.
Well there are scenarios where that isn't the case. For example, if you are a whale shorting the price and then you do activities which cause a run away from STEEM POWER, then you can drive the ratio of STEEM POWER to STEEM very low and you can stay in STEEM POWER minting money at 349% yearly as I showed the math for in my recent blog. Then on top of that dominating rewards at you take nearly all of them by gradually taking over more and more of the voting power. You are profiting in every way. That is sort of nuclear option though so I am not counting that as the likely one. Which is why I wrote in the blog post that "perhaps tolerable".
Also it does make sense to act like hustler because the deviant whale can convert illiquid STEEM POWER to liquid STEEM DOLLARS as rewards, so he can cash out sooner. Also can perhaps obscure that he is cashing out.
That $1 million in STEEM POWER can normally only be cashed out at ~$10,000 per week.
Game theory is very complex. It is very easy to miss some cases.
RE: Blog rewards CAN’T be widely distributed