RE: I Was Wrong - (About HF 20)
come up with a better suggestion than sending them to the pool. The alternatives I have heard are to send to the post author, or to distribute among later curators. Think about what that means for the most important cases we are trying to solve for - the 0 minute self voters in front of bid bots, and the huge accounts that self vote. In both cases, keeping the money in the pool for that post does absolutely nothing for smaller accounts. In the case of bid bots, you are either giving the reward to the user who is paying for the bid bots on their own posting, or you are giving more curation reward to the bid bot itself. In the case of the large account self voting, if the reward stays in the pool for their own post they just set up a secondary vote to collect it. Both of those suggestions are clearly not a net win for smaller accounts. HF20 proposal is a net win for smaller accounts.
I am not going to say HF20 is the best possible solution - but I haven't heard a better one yet.
The fact that this is the most important case you're trying to solve for - and not the new user who just wants to use their vote as a vote and not have a chunk of it taken away for bizarre reasons - is incredibly terrible system design. You need to support that new user first and then figure out what you're doing about the other.
My proposal solves the problem of extra curation going to authors and bots. It actually does a better job of it than HF20 does. You just don't like that it still allows voters, including the author, to give 100% of the value of their own vote to the author. Even though authors will still be able to do this trivially anyway and you're just taking that option away from everyone else.