Thanks for the clarification.

Indeed, the curve does what you'd expect it to do: distribute the rewards more unevenly among posts. The rationale for that is that is makes it easier to limit the amount of value sucked out from the system by spam and farmed low-quality, low-value posts flying under the radar. Many people expected this to result in worse non-merit-based income inequality than before. But increased downvotes put an end to the bid bot industry, which made former bots curators, which in turn made the whole platform much more meritocratic.