A lack of clear game theory for Moons

tldr; It's impossible to derive a clear strategy even with perfect decision-makers. Downvoting others won't bring you extra moons, mainly because of the reddit karma system. The reddit algorithm is watching you and changes your karma weighting accordingly.

​

For those who don't know, there is a set amount of moons distributed each period (slowly decreasing) and it is divided between users according to the amount of karma you got for that period (with some limits and different weightings you can see in passed governance polls here).

Naively one might think you should downvote everything that isn't your content, so that everyone else's karma decreases, while yours remains the same, and thus you get a higher share of that month's moons. There are two main problems with this reasoning:

​

1. an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind (except that one guy at the end with one eye); or in other words if everyone realised this and it worked then everything would be downvoted to zero karma and moons themselves would be a failure and acquire zero value. But humans (especially r/cryptocurrency subscribers) aren't perfect logicians, so the real breakdown of the oversimplified analysis above is:
2. karma is not linear and is user-action-dependent; for example see this graph here which seems to weight karma proportional to the square root of the number of upvotes. If a user goes on a downvote spree, the negative karma associated with each downvote becomes less and less; leaving the user with less power within that community, or the whole of reddit (the exact internal reddit calculation is not publicly known).

​

If we want to derive an optimal strategy for an individual to maximise their moons, we need game theory, which is a way to model strategic interaction among rational decision-makers. But for this we need the internal reddit karma algorithm (which we do not have access to) and also need to consider the decision-makers (you and me) as rational. Which might not be the most sound assumption...

Let me know what you think in the comments!