pull down to refresh
Sure. But the post fee was 100, not 500. And you said yourself: you try to find alternatives to ~privacy due to the post fee there... of 500. What I'm trying to illustrate is not that you're wrong in theory, I'm saying that that's not what happens, and it would be a pretty sad outcome if the constant sock puppeting were the actual case.
In the end the problem isn't so much that downzaps are 0.3, 1, 2 or 3x as powerful. It's that there are not enough zaps in general, and definitely relative to downzap budget. You can see the problem expressed graphically on the top right here. Check out the zap and downzap total expenditure for 2/18.
When I decided to test last week what would happen if I were to do big zaps on @SimpleStacker's post, I knew it was going to be matched, that was not what I was fishing for. What I wanted to know was: 1. who will "zap with" to defend the principle, and 2. who will hide their tools. It's a test to see if there is a reason, for example in September this year, to think that stackers are going to fight. I think I've gotten a pretty good idea who will fight.
I didn't bring my tools back out because i'm afraid of solomonsatoshi, fwiw. It was always a bit of a joke to begin with that blew up into something bigger than I ever intended it to be, so after I few days I decided to go back to "normal".
I don't mind keeping my cowboy essentials hidden still though. SS can downzap me all he wants.
Thinking about @k00b's point that it causes problems to assume that one account = one person, perhaps it does make sense to treat boosts (self-zaps from your own account) like a sockpuppet self-zap rather than the current 0 sats from a boost go directly back to the booster -- some possibly do via rewards.
If the reality you describe is what often happens, it means we have a easily gameable distortion built in: if someone uses a sockpuppet to zap themselves, it is clearly one-sided in the self-zappers favor:
If we assume both poster and downzapper start with the same number of sats:
Perhaps SN needs to operate on the premise that using a sockpuppet never gives a stacker an advantage over using their own account.