Calculating the effect of downvoting on MOON distributions

/r/CryptoCurrency is currently ranked #10 for posts per day – yet ranked #1198 for post karma. Such a huge discrepancy is blamed on the reluctance of users to award karma and/or downvoting.

But does downvoting actually make a difference?

93.65% of users received less than 100 MOONs in the last distribution. But for simplicity, let’s look at this from the perspective of a user who earned 100 MOONs:

Downvotes MOONs Gained

10 0.00016

100 0.00157

1000 0.01562

10000 0.15642

63405 1.00013

Data: 1,710,052 MOONs were distributed last month, based on 6,403,903 karma (MOONs/karma ratio of 0.267. I assume 1 upvote = 1 karma, however, in reality, karma is awarded with diminishing returns.

To realise a 1% gain i.e. +1 additional MOON, you would have had to remove 63,405 karma from the pool.

That’s a colossal and utterly futile task that not only discourages people from participating in /r/CryptoCurrency but will, ultimately, devalue MOONs in the long-term as people lose interest and leave. In other words: congratulations, you played yourself.

The average user in the last round gained 2.67 MOONs (based on 10 karma). Check your vaults – MOONs are rounded to a limited number of decimal places. By downvoting, the average user likely gained nothing at all.

Nevertheless, downvoting is an important part of filtering low-quality content, misinformation etc. – just don’t waste your time doing it for the sole purpose of MOONs.

TLDR: No, for a given user – the effect is absolutely tiny or zero.