Downvote Pool Deep DivesteemCreated with Sketch.

in #steem5 years ago

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Hello Steemians, I’m @vandeberg, Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit and today I want to do a more technical deep dive in to the proposed downvote pool in the Steem EIP. One of the core tenants of Steem is the belief in the wisdom of the crowd to curate and reward good content. The current economic model limits every account's ability to earn by a resource called "voting mana". Whenever your vote, whether it be an upvote, downvote, or changing your vote, some of this voting mana is used up. When it is all gone, your votes no longer impact rewards.

Of these three actions, only one of them rewards the user, upvoting. Neither changing your vote nor downvoting can reward you. It then makes sense that if you greedily optimize your return on investment, you would only upvote content as downvoting it would be a waste of your precious voting mana.

However, downvoting is an integral piece of the curation process. An ideal solution would incentivize downvoting with rewards, but we have yet to come up with a solution that is fair and not exploitable. In the meantime, we believe allowing users to have some downvotes without consuming their voting mana is a reasonable solution. While it does not incentivize curating through downvotes, it removes the direct cost of downvoting, which should make downvoting a more economically viable option.

What we propose to do is to create a separate downvote pool that can contain its own mana up to some percentage of the mana that the upvote pool can contain. Downvotes will be taken from the downvote pool first, and then the upvote pool once the downvote pool has been consumed. The downvote pool will follow the same rules as the upvote pool, regenerating over five days and filling instantly and proportionally to new Steem Power and delegations.

We think having a downvote pool that is 10-25% the size of the voting mana pool would serve as a good starting point. The good way to think of this is that a certain number of downvotes are free before you are charged for downvoting. Charged only in the sense that you are losing potential rewards you could have gotten from upvoting. That number needs to be high enough to make a difference, but not too high that it becomes exploitable.

The obvious alternative solution is to have two entirely separate pools for upvotes and downvotes. We believe this is a bad idea because it would allow the reward system to devolve into a zero sum game without consequence. Each account could award and remove an equal number of reward shares to content. If everyone did this, then no content would have any reward shares and would then not get any reward.

Furthermore, there are users out there that understand this change is adding resources for them to use and will use whatever resources they have available. A downvote against someone else is a small upvote for everyone else. We expect some users will use all their downvotes to maximize their returns. In an effort to curb that behavior, we are recommending to not create a full separate pool.

This hybrid approach captures the best of both approaches. It does not give too many additional resources to users that will use/abuse all that we give them and frees up normal users that may not be downvoting to do so without financial penalty.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below, or if there is another aspect of the blockchain that I should explore next.

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Maybe you remember that I would support the implementation of a "convergent linear rewards curve". Concerning 'downvotes' I had the following thoughts (copied from my own post "My STEEM Vision."):

I think it's good and right that the possibility to flag (now called downvoting) exists in a decentralized social network. How else can spam or even worse, such as child pornography, be fought? I also think it makes sense in principle to be able to reduce the reward for posts that are extremely overrated from one's own point of view.
The crux, however, is that downvotes are often set for the sole reason of pursuing other users, solely because of their dissenting opinions or even completely independent of what they write(!), and denying them permanent visibility and any rewards. This is counterproductive to say the least and makes a devastating impression on newcomers who happen to observe such 'flag wars' or even get into them! We should be aware of this.
If it were up to me, ways and means would have to be found to contain 'flag wars' waged purely for personal motives. For example, a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power could be called in such cases and then decide whether the flags were justified or not.
In my opinion the suggestion to provide each user with a certain number of free downvotes so that spam (or overvalued posts) would be flagged more frequently in the future, wouldn't really make a big difference under the current conditions. I assume that only whales flagged more often than before, while smaller accounts would still not dare to do so for fear of retaliation.

Nevertheless, your idea of the "hybrid approach" is interesting and at least makes it somewhat less profitable to flag a lot, "just for fun".

I like your view which does not fall aside from Steemit view (I think). And wanted to just comment on something you said that is quite interesting...

If it were up to me, ways and means would have to be found to contain 'flag wars' waged purely for personal motives. For example, a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power could be called in such cases and then decide whether the flags were justified or not.

This is basically a DAO for me. Which would make lots of sense, to me.

So, elaborating on your idea... a pool of STEEM could be "formed" based on either the weight of how much people like about the DAO representatives. The POOL would not be owned by anyone specifically and it would be up to the "board" that represent and execute the "work" how to spend that POOL on downvoting "cases" (no matter the size, but I would imagine that bigger ones would tend to be more popular here). This would be something like a justice council for complex schemes of downvoting within the community. Just like a court... of some sort... But one that gets decided by the community.

Does it make any sense for you guys?

Does it make any sense for you guys?

If you ask me: yes, something like that (the idea still needs further elaboration) ...
Of course there shouldn't be discussed every single flag because that would be huge amount of work and too time-consuming. I see it as a means for cases like when - for example - one user feels threatened in his STEEM existence because a whale is permanently flagging him.

The "time-consuming" to me, is always something to sort with UIs and some AI-assisted facilitation for the user... But I understand why you mentioned it. In the future this will become less prone to "hard work" based activity, and there will be more intelligent ways for users to do analysis and make decisions quicker.

Hm ... apart from the fact that it could be possible to support decision making in future by AI, would you be in favour of deciding about every single flag?
I had in mind that such a 'committee' would only get active if someone complains ... but of course that's not the only thinkable option.

Not every single flag... I would think it as, "you need to bring a special case". In my view the community should be the one to flag. But on situations of power or scheme where the user is somehow imprisoned either by lack of power or because of "bugs"... this committee should be there "to make things better". They might not be able to solve all problems, and that is a consequence of who votes for the committee.

AI will mostly (or should) help with analysis of things. Giving you valuable information about what's happening without you having to go and look for everything (which is practically already impossible on STEEM).

Here is our new post with a few proposals that address the issues you are mentioning and put possible solutions on the table from the perspective of the antiabuse community:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jaguar.force/a-few-modest-proposals-regarding-the-downvote-pool-1559521991347
We eagerly look forward to your feedback.

Hi, in general users/organization like you(rs) are very important for the platform.

Here my questions:

  • Do you 'only' fight against spam and plagiarism (which is great anyway) or also against flag abuse? Look for example at the self-upvoted whale comment on top under the recent article of @timcliff and the automatically flagged (from alt accounts of the same whale) comment under this comment.
    I think if whales upvote their own comments (by the way full of bad language) like this, while at the same time flagging other comments, that causes the same damage for STEEM like plagiarism. Of course I would flag this comment (but only if I intended to stop posting forever on STEEM, because of the expected retaliation flags) ... :)

  • Please check my answer to @steemcleaners under this post. I think @steemcleaners, you and other useful groups fighting against spam and plagiarism should communicate directly under the the post of accused people with them (and at least at first in a constructive and friendly way; not everybody is using places like Discord or Steem Chat, and not everybody making a mistake always had bad intentions).
    Also please read what I wrote there concerning well known myths/sagas ...

  • In your post you are asking for delegations. Do people who are delegating you get any kind of interest/rewards?

  • Apart from that your ideas in the mentioned article are both very interesting.

ok.. some speek english

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It good that we are thinking about this.

i think overall downvotes are bad. They tend to create a lot more damage then good and create really bad user experience.

We have lost many great content producers because of downvotes.

I urge you to keep this in mind.

Even if I just get 20% if my voting power as free downvotes, i can now run around and take money away from people and would have to do this, in order to maximize my rewards. This will lead to people downvoting each other and will create a culture of downvote wars, that can be nasty.

Please keep this in mind.

Since you brought up changing your vote perhaps you can look into how that works. As I understand it (but I could be wrong and have not searched into the code), changing a vote from 20% to 21% takes mana of a 21% vote, not a 1% vote (and in addition forfeits any curation rewards that the original 20% vote may have earned). This creates an incentive to split ones stake up into tiny pieces so that instead of changing a vote one can just add another 1% from a different account.

If there is not actually any exploit here (and perhaps it is not the exact one I mentioned but some other one with respect to changing votes), I would also be interested to learn that since the claim has been made to me that there is, and that users without fleets of many small/bot accounts are placed at a disadvantage.

Could you please explain in detail, what influences/increases/decreases the total rewards fund? In the two years that I have been active here, i have seen it differ in size between 650.000 and 900.000 Steem.
I never understood what influences the total rewards fund the most. Obviously, the number of votes in the 7 day period and rshares behind those are a factor, but is that all?

I think it's the inflation rate that factors into how great the reward pool is.

Posted using Partiko Android

Can't wait to see the effect of separate downvote pool on our current trending list, perhaps people will think twice should they really be promoting their content to top spots. Finally the community can start efficiently curating, pushing good content up and bad content down, as we should've been able from the very start.

Thank you for making these posts by the way!

I wonder have you explored how many posts in trending 1-20 spots are promoted over a long period of time? And how much manual, active curation is happening compared to passive?

Good reasoning and good question.

I can answer simply, all top 20 post are promoted. The important question is what's their cost in % and net $ after reward returns.

The answer is; it takes currently a budget of 115$ worth of STEEM to promote a fresh post near the top with cost of about -5%. yes, negative cost, that's a 5% profit. Meaning anything less than a 5$ downvote has no negative effect whatsoever in people promoting bad content to the top.

There are two solution to this.

  1. More downvotes where it matters first, (the top trendings)
  2. Remove all profits to vote buyers by making vote buying more easily accessible to everyone and letting people willing to pay a high premium do so.

A lot of more external money would be interested in buying votes at high premium if the top #trendings were bigger center of attention.

At @Steemium we've been collecting historical data of every bidbot bidding rounds and snapshots of top 50 trending for the last 7 months. Here are some charts that might interest you https://steemium.com/#/statistics/trending

I'm not in support or opposition to the proposal, but I have feedback...

(i) "Let's try it and see what happens" may not be the ideal methodology, and I'm not sure that it demonstrates a sufficient level of fiduciary responsibility for a blockchain with a $120 million market cap.

(ii) Mathematically, there must be a positive-value voting scheme that's functionally equivalent to one that involves voting with negative votes. Or at least one that deescalates the flag wars, rather than providing them with more fuel.

(iii) Something modeled after second price auctions might serve the dual-purposes of discouraging votes that overvalue a post (whether self-vote, collusive voting, or for any other reason), and also disencentivizing downvotes that are wildly out of step with the community.

(iv) If implemented, how long is everything going to be stalled waiting for the rewards pools to return to equilibrium?

(v) Is there any quantitative evidence to suggest that the proposal is better than the status quo?

First no single entity has any feduciary responsibility for the blockchain, everyone is either holding stake or isn't, those with stake cannot be said to have such a role over the blockchain but what can be suggested is that in safeguarding their stake/investment they are incentivized to maintain such a role, although indirectly. I wouldn't call it 'let's try it and see what happens' but frankly that is exactly how science of all manners is conducted. The hypothesis is clear: free downvotes will lead to people using the downvotes to combat abuse and encourage self policing, we are trying to see what free downvotes would do and why they would work is very sound and well reasoned: at the moment it make no sense for individuals to spend their resources on fighting abuse when they could focus them on endlessly more rewarding things.

Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes. This has been considered probably from before steem was even a solid idea and AFAIK there has not been any code changes that were suggested that weren't mere hurdles and caused negative behavior to be more obscure and thus harder to detect and that much more difficult to combat.

We don't have any evidence because we have no experience, to gain experience we must try things, we might brake them but we will always learn, regardless if it's a poor decision or a good one, but if we don't try, if we don't take the leap, we won't know.

Posted using Partiko Android

"...Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes."

This is objectively false. Flags can just be omitted via code. Votes altogether can just be omitted via code.

Code is infinitely immutable, and good code can fix every problem bad code creates.

Unfortunately, we're throwing more bad code after bad code, and the problems we already suffer are going to get worse as soon as these code changes are implemented. Incentive to imbue Steem with value isn't effected via extant code, and the tweaks discussed are just going to make that worse, and that's all because the devs either aren't experienced investors, or aren't interested in imbuing Steem with value.

Code currently encourages stakeholders to strip value from Steem by extracting rewards via unlimited upvotes, delegation, etc. Code can change that.

But it won't, because profiteers were encouraged to profit, and presently control the lion's share of stake, and they don't want to change the status quo. Every time disruption occurs, it costs stakeholders profiting from extant conditions.

After these tweaks are implemented and things get worse, feel free to comment to me regarding my comments that that is what will happen. Don't think you will, but feel free to.

When I said that flag wars cannot be countered through code I wasn't being obtuse and saying you can't remove flag altogether but that in having flag you are going to have people abuse them. You're being obtuse because the issue is in how to counter flag wars through code and still have flags, as is clearly implied.

There's no such thing as good code like you want us to believe, or bad code. You won't explain why it will make it worse, so we can dismiss it as easily as you want to assert it.

Code do not encourage people to strip value, stop asserting the exact same nonsense that I have called you out on numerous times and which you failed or refused to address EVERY FUCKING TIME.

Posted using Partiko Android

You're fucking delusional.

Gravity is why water flows downhill, and code is why people vote the way they do. Code is infinitely mutable, and can be changed, unlike gravity. I'd try to cogently explain how this can be done, but you won't even acknowledge any points I make. I know this because I've attempted to engage with you previously, and that is what you did.

Have a nice day.

Bullshit and lies. You never explained you only assert nonsense, not once did you Reason or explain, and here you are trying to say that "code is why people vote the way they do" and we are discussing not why or how people vote but exactly what code is bad, and why and how it is so, and you tried to avoid it AGAIN and make it seem like you have any idea about it when you don't and if you did you didn't bother to explain it even once. Fucking nonsense.

Posted using Partiko Android

Here before an overwhelming majority prove my delusion, it should be a challenge anyone would gladly accept IMO, why do I have the sneaking suspicion that all that will happen is silent acquiescence to the fact that you're a bullshit liar or the one in delusion?

Posted using Partiko Android

https://partiko.app/@kevinwong/feeling-good-about-steem-again-here-s-my-side-of-the-story

There you are again assertion nonsense and thinking that your proposal is sound in the least, you had again nothing to say when both I and Kevin pointed out the obvious flaws but you still persist, as if. I confronted you two or three times previously and once you got defensive because I called you Nonsense, NON-Sense and accused me completely mistakenly of attacking your character. Gtfo. The next time you had nothing or didn't want to say anything, when I asked you repeatedly why would people invest or power up rewards. Your proposal is SHIT. It has no economic sense, it's nonsense, it confuses things and asserts head shaking... BRACE YOURSELF :

NOFUCKTARDSENSE

EXACTLY LIKE IN THE THREAD ABOVE.

See, you are an idiot :) poor chap!!! @baah

How nice of your troll self to offer me some fake pity after you thoroughly failed at trolling me. Troll on brother, if you don't, who will?!

The collective body that's deciding which version of code to run has a fiduciary responsibility. To some extent, that includes everyone, but in reality, it's a relatively small group of people.

You can't know with certainty what will happen without trying it, but you can gain an increased level of confidence by doing formal analysis of the change, and developing research-backed theories that are more reliable than our intuitions. You can also increase your level of confidence by running simulations.

Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes

Where is the evidence for this? If self-voting can't be countered through code changes, there's no point in implementing the change. As suggested in item (iii), however, I suspect that they actually can be mitigated by realigning the voting incentives.

They don't have any such responsibility, what they are responsible for is running the nodes/servers and updating the price feed (ugh), all else is a matter of desire not of necessity.

I don't understand what you want me to provide since you seem to want me to demonstrate a negative proof. There have been a lot of suggestions and, much like your 2nd price action, they weren't considered fully in how a bad actor would overcome them. In the end, they all have one common thread: tax/burden the community and obfuscate undesirable behavior, unwittingly. You seem to think that by splitting stake up to jump over the hurdle is making abuse more obvious, but frankly I don't know how you can reason that, how it's easier to link multiple accounts together in a scheme than to simply recognize one abusive account.

Again, the way to realign incentives is not through Law but the enforcement of law, likewise, the flag enforces the law of "thou shall not voturbate" because implementing any such law is only at the expense of everyone who doesn't abuse self voting and it barely can be considered a hurdle to those determined to do the least for the most.

Posted using Partiko Android

I don't want you to provide anything, and I'm not the one that needs to be convinced. I'm content with either decision. I'm saying that the people who decide which version of code to run should demand more than an intuitive demonstration that the change will make things better.

What does better mean? In curation, "better" means that it is more likely to rank a set of posts in the correct order, according to user preferences. So, it seems to me that the witnesses who will run the code should ask whoever is proposing the change to provide some level of evidence that the post ranking after the change is likely to be more correct (closer to matching user preferences) than post ranking before the change.

Again, the way to realign incentives is not through Law but the enforcement of law

Your argument seems self-contradictory. On one hand, you say that the rules don't matter - and we need to just depend on curators to downvote, but you're making that argument in support of a rule change. If we can't solve the problem of incorrect ranking of posts by changing the rules of the game, then why are we having this conversation at all?

They aren't asking for any demonstration because there is no testing or scoring for such a demonstration, the only way to get data, the. Only. Way. Is to try it.

Curation isn't what you make it out to be by far, it's another word for saying review / rate. That's it. It's not about correct or incorrect ordering, it's about "I rate this as x dollars". After all let's not kid ourselves that we are curators at a natural history museum or the like...

What this proposal is about is not "fixing curation" but incentivizing policing the network, making it not profitable to self vote, bid bot, or circle jerk, make it cost little to nothing to counter plagiarism / fraud etc..

You're asking for some level of evidence that this proposal is going to make users more likely to rank a set of posts in a correct order but the preposterous notion isn't only that this proposal is not about that or that there aren't any metrics to measure "a correct order to user preference" (kinda oxymoron, as preference and correct are contradictory ideas, one is objective t/f and binary correct or incorrect, the other is subjective and variable) but that there isn't any place or system that could be used to determine that besides steem.

My argument is not that rules don't matter, I'm saying that having rules without enforcement is redundant, and putting it into code only burdens everyone, much like your suggestion, while those that seek the least amount of work for the most profit will exploit it either way, if they have to go around the obstacles you place they will. By allowing people to enforce rules that needent be even expressed or explained but are simply "unwritten" (ie George Carlin's unwritten rules of the road) then you don't have to deal with figuring out exactly who is who as they are going around your obstacles. I hope it makes sense, I'm sure there are others who could better explain the conundrum.

Posted using Partiko Android

The point of a content curation system is to produce a ranked list of content. Yes, from the voter's perspective, it's just "I rank this as x dollars", but a good content curation system will aggregate all of those individual decisions into an ordered set that approximates the actual combined preferences of the users so that readers can quickly find things of interest.

In that context, it is possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a particular voting scheme before injecting it into the blockchain.

You should read A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation. There is much to learn, and it suggests several techniques by which the strengths and weakness of any proposal might be quantified before slapping it into the running block chain.

It's very simple to calculate. What is the Median power of an average voter? What is the power of a community vote? Of a bid-bot? Of a whale?

Case closed :D

There's no system or place to analyze that. It's preposterous to think that this could be tested anywhere but in the real world.

Posted using Partiko Android

The fallacy in your logic is that you believe everyone will have the same definition of "abuse".

No, I never said anything about 'everyone has the same definition' of shit so try again, person who thinks that booing and jeering or thumbs down/ downvoting is not free expression and thinks that censorship is downvoting not curation (despite the that it is explicitly referred to as curation in the post). Muh Strawman.

Exactly. You never said it. That's my point. No strawman here. Just facts.

Posted using Partiko Android

So your pointing out a fallacy "I believe" which coincidentally I never even implied let alone expressed and you didn't think it's a strawman, especially when it isn't relevant or a valid contention to what my position was..
#nonsequitur

Posted using Partiko Android

I would prefer having dislikes and likes and upvotes but not financial downvotes or flags.

Then people would just self vote.

If Steemit chooses to continue having flags and downvotes, could they at least choose not to hide flagged posts? I know hidden posts can be revealed. But I don't enjoy clicking on the reveal button to see hidden posts from people, including you. I saw that people flagged your comments. So, I click on show, on reveal, on unhide, to read flagged comments of yours. I understand why flagged posts are hidden, and I understand the thinking behind that system, but I would prefer flagged posts not being hidden. I have heard that Steemit has like a reverse-auction system or whatever you want to call the upvoting / pool / cryptocurrency / blockchain system. So, I understand the philosophy or theory behind how flags can help in that system a whole lot or maybe just a bit.

Why? I enjoy, really do, being 'hidden', and if you understand why they are hidden but would prefer otherwise you can use both partiko and busy.org to see the otherwise hidden items.

Posted using Partiko Android

I understand why things are hidden but I disagree with that way of thinking.

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

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The challenge with rewarding downvotes is partially in the fact that it is so easy to reward upvotes. If a piece of content gets paid a certain amount, then part of those rewards are shared with the curators. In essence, it is a profit sharing model the rewards earlier upvotes that theoretically took more risk on upvoting than later voters. It is easy to quantify if the upvote was worth it based on the resulting payout.

How do you quantify the success of a downvote? If it made sense to concentrate downvotes on bad content, then you could reward those downvotes in a similar fashion to upvotes. But then you run in to the awkward question of how you would reward an upvote on content that made 0 STEEM. It doesn't make sense that you would reward the upvote. After all, the community determined the content was worthless. Why would you reward someone for thinking the content was valuable? That situation highlights the intuition we have when the rules are mirrored that somehow get lost when we look at a downvote in a sea of upvotes. We are open to suggestions on how downvotes might be rewarded and agree that it would be the ideal solution. Our goal with the EIP is not to nail down the ideal, but simply and carefully move closer to it, one step at a time.

Regarding second price auctions, the idea is interesting, but sadly there are simple behaviors that will get around it. If the highest vote gets thrown out, then I will split my stake among more accounts and continue self voting. Then only a fraction of my stake would get ignored via the second price auction rules. Your simulated results are better than expected because they don't account from any emergent behavior as a result of the change. This is one of the biggest challenges faced by the scientific community with regards to social sciences. I appreciate that you are thinking through these problems as well and trying to come up with solutions!

When I have considered rewarding downvotes in the past, my idea was to reward any vote which moves the payout toward its eventual result, but not those which move it away. So for example, if there is an upvote to $10 and then a downvote back down to $0, the downvote would get a reward but the upvote would not. Yes, this means that the downvote got a reward even when the post did not, but this could be justified in that the downvote saved the system money (paying out on something which in the end, was determined to be worthless).

There are no doubt numerous complications and this may not be feasible at all, but I thought I would throw the idea out there again.

So.. A whale could use their 'bonus' downvote power to downvote anyone they don't like the sound of or who disagrees with them (perhaps even disagreeing on the future of Steem, for example). They would then be rewarded for silencing dissent AND increase the rewards available for themselves and their self upvoting in the process.. Win, Win.. for the whales. Lose, lose for anyone who disagrees with them.
I recall we talked through this a few months ago and we didn't reach an agreement - I seem to recall you acknowledged that a separate downvote pool has it's problems.. I still think that a separate downvote pool has HUGE problems and as others have pointed out - many of them are as much psychological as anything else. New users don't like diving into a pool where the food sources are already heavily controlled by a small number of 'fish'. If those fish are actually sharks and now have the ability to not only hoard the food, but actively remove it from others on a large scale - then very few people will want to be here.
This community relies on those with the most stake making 'good' decisions for the community, but in reality, few agree on what that means and the typical approach seems to be "well, of course I'm going to do everything I can to maximise my 'return' - I'm funding all of you other users anyway". This is, unfortunately, more of an anti-social networking approach than a social one.
I feel what has been lacking is a shared vision and mission for Steem that everyone can align with. Adding the ability to create more division, without adding a powerful aligning mechanism to unite people is a recipe for disaster imo.

There can be no shared vision in a system which is designed to favor particular stakeholders. Steem is such a system, and stakeholders are inherently opposed to one another by the metric through which some are preferentially favored. The essential metric here is stake. The more stake you have, the more you are favored.

Want a shared vision? Create a platform that potentiates it. Wanna see more downvotes? Make them cheaper for whales that can afford them, like the bully that'll flag this comment. The only proof anyone needs that the DV pool will be abused to further harm ordinary users will be visible in response to this comment.

Thanks!

It should be noted that iflagtrash just follows you and automatically downvotes you so it is not curating at all. It is just attacking.

You're correct. It is contrary to the purpose and raison d'etre of a social network to automate votes.

Thanks!

So.. A whale could use their 'bonus' downvote power to downvote

No, a mechanism (a generous description since it is more of a half-baked concept than a true mechanism) as I describe would be a replacement for 'bonus' downvote power, not in addition to it.. Since downvotes and upvotes would both be (under the right conditions) rewarded, there would not be an imbalance the way there is now.

Both downvotes and upvotes are valuable work. The soundness of the system depends on payout being a good measure of value, not too high nor too low. Currently only upvotes are rewarded and downvotes are seen as a public service where the system may benefit but the person doing the downvoting is not recognized in any way for this service. That's a large part of why we see virtually no downvotes.

Anyway, I don't think this is worth a whole lot of discussion since it is nowhere near solid enough to be implemented any time soon.

My comment was really addressing the general concept of a separate downvote pool, but also considering the downvoter being rewarded too. Most of the problems I see also apply to the situation whether downvotes are rewarded or not. I don't have an issue with more downvoting power being 'theoretically' helpful - but in the wider context, considering all the other rules and balances/imbalances, I personally still think it's a bad idea. But hey, it's not up to me - it's up to those with the most stake.. Who, I'm sure, will be looking out for the little guy all the way. lol

Who, I'm sure, will be looking out for the little guy all the way.

I'm about as cynical about this as you are generally speaking, however, in the short term there is a synergy. Most of the big guys do recognize that the little guys (improving both growth and retention) are the path to growth and to the price of Steem ceasing its long spiral toward zero.

This really isn't about the big guys coming up with a way to rape more value from within the system, as most are doing a perfectly fine job of that already. If that were the goal, the best thing to do, and certainly the easiest, would probably be nothing.

I see the one selling point of Steem, that cannot easily be corrupted by money, is the free speech aspect. By making downvotes a bonanza for the wealthy - we risk removing that strength. People who say that downvoting isn't censorship are right on a certain level, but wrong on another. Messages get promoted online primarily via social media and advertising on social media - so, often, those with the most money get heard the most. Downvoting removes reach from messages/people and will be weighted more in favour of those with the most money if they get extra downvote power in relation to stake. If downvotes just removed rewards then it would be less of an issue, but they currently also limit reach. Maybe UIs would be developed to incorporate the ability to view lists of posts without the effect of downvotes to compensate for this - but it just feels to be the wrong approach here. I feel like this 'feature' is just wallpapering over the cracks.
If the main selling point of downvoting is a way to counteract bots, I think there are better ways to do that.

more of an anti-social networking approach than a social one.

Great comment, how toxic can we make it?

We'll soon see. I expect EIP to be implemented soon, perhaps even HF21. Will that be enough to shake off all the fleas that parasitize the whales? (one perspective, advocated by bidbots), or enough to eliminate the market that makes the stake of whales have value? (my perspective). My view predicts that implementing EIP will quickly reduce the value of Steem and drop it's rank on CMC. In the event that is the result of EIP, I do hope that the rapine profiteers that have plagued Steem from the beginning will join the exodus, and perhaps allow socially positive corrections to be rapidly implemented in the aftermath.

Completely agree!

True and downvoting is dangerous. I would prefer having likes and dislikes and upvotes and a view count. I understand why people feel like they need downvoting. But, it can be dangerous and stuff like you said.

I see a huge window for whale abuse here. The mechanics seems sound, but the psychology isn't.

We will find ways to deal with it. Stay in touch.

That's very easy to abuse. Whales have a clear incentive to vote against the little guys and essentially rob them of their value, because it wipes away their rewards increasing the available pool for the whale.

Has anyone stopped and considered the basic fundamental question of whether this will bring more users in or drive current users away?

I am betting this drives significantly more users away than it brings in...

There is no way downvotes will be used responsibly which more than negates any possible benefits.

 5 years ago (edited)

The concept of the EIP is about the combined effect of three changes, not just this one. The idea is to make desirable behavior more profitable, and negative behavior less profitable. Currently it's most profitable (and easiest) to delegate your stake to a bidbot and not even play, which is what many large stakeholders are doing. If it becomes more profitable to actually curate content, people will do that. That means more rewards for good authors, and fewer rewards for bidbot delegation (or self voting) and people who choose not to participate. So - if that goal is achieved, more people curating will in turn lead to more good content and people actually being rewarded for that good content. A small portion of 'free' downvotes is a piece of this puzzle.

I think if people are more likely to receive rewards from the effect of stakeholders participating, they will be much more likely to stay. If good content is being appreciated and curated, people will be more likely to stay. It's part of the value proposition of proof of brain and the current economic incentives don't fully align with that original vision. The EIP attempts to bring us back closer to that goal.

Isn't it possible that proof of brain just doesn't work? I would venture to say that stake weighted voting and proof of brain failed when there is money involved. It was a nice idea but human nature and all that makes it work better in theory than in reality. Continuing down this path would be fool-hearty.

But to go down this path slightly... so you think the cure is for stake holders to spend their time on here sniffing out the 10 "highest quality" posts each day among the thousands of other posts? And we think that system will appeal to people? No one wants to come on here and spend all day searching through posts to find the "10 best", it's not fun, it's a job.

And what would compel people to invest money into that system?!

Again, I think you guys need to step back and ask yourself if this is more likely to bring in more people than it drives away? If the answer is no, or not sure, the idea should be scrapped immediately.

People want to be rewarded for their good content. That concept is solid, no doubt about it. People want to be able to monetize their content. Giving incentive to reward good content drives engagement. User's seeing good content being rewarded drives user's to our front door. Using your stake to generate rewards is an incentive to hold SP.

Are there other things that can be done that help user retention? Absolutely - but most of them are front end / applications level work, not blockchain development... The first thing that comes to mind is communities, and the list of other things is certainly long, but attainable.

Under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.
As long as you cannot contain this kind a flagging (for example by institute an elected committee with much delegated SP), I am strictly against a pool of free flaggs.

It's not that downvoting doesn't have downsides, they are considerable. It's just that without a modest amount of free downvotes, we don't really have a realistic chance of turning this place around at all.

Currently, we're paying content indifferent voting behavior (self vote, vote selling) 4x more than curation. When we bump curation to 50%, there's still a 2x gap. The modest amount of free downvotes are further designed to bridge that gap.

I'm one of the ones who recommended these specific numbers for the EIP and I can tell you I'm very aware for the adverse effects. Let's say that at any given time, under the EIP they'll be around 5,000,000 SP worth of whales consistently being abusive with their downvotes on purpose. 25% of that is 1.25m SP out there making everyone's lives miserable.

Now look at the flip side, instead of next to nothing, if everything works out, you could have 100m SP worth of upvotes being cast in a relatively honest way that is reflecting their appraisal of the content. And half that money will be finding its way into the pockets of good content creators.

Maybe my numbers are a little optimistic, especially the latter, but overall it seems like a good trade off. We can't focus too much on the negatives alone without looking at the positives.

Ok, but what defines "good content"? Everyone has a different definition of what "good" is, with a major bias towards their own.

But besides that point, we likely won't even get to that part of the discussion because the vast majority of downvotes will be personal in nature instead of altruistic and responsible. What is your solution for that?

Under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.

I am sure that won't bring new users here.

Hey, jrcornel ...

I wanted to say I enjoyed your comments. You are spot on!!! Keep going strong!!!

I think seeking perfection with this is really dangerous. I'm in favor of very slow and highly tested development for the curation and distribution systems of steem. The problem with current algos (curation) they are gamed with ML . But that brings you to the bidbots. The bidbots should be used as advertising in certain bidbot feeds on the front ends. I'm really much happier when we find front end solutions to a potentially , non existent blockchain problem. Maybe our problem's solution is just right in front of us. Advertising is a natural thing. How can steemit really innovate the advertising markets and turn them upside down completely? That's your bidbot fix.

Hopefully you are wrong about that, because the Hobo Media project aims to do exactly what you just described. Allow for people to do the "job" of voting the top 10 best journalistic pieces on Steem for the day for large rewards. This concept should work if the theme is sort of like a writing competition, however, in order for that to work the reward needs to be significant.

Isn't it possible that proof of brain just doesn't work? I would venture to say that stake weighted voting and proof of brain failed when there is money involved.

You are talking about yourself, only.

I see no reason that increasing curation rewards in any way changes the extant dynamic for profiteers. It just increases the value to them of upvotes. Increasing curation rewards will be adapted to by bots to encourage hassle free profiteering via delegation.

The actual solution is to remove the ability of stake to profiteer from their votes. I have repeatedly pointed out one mechanism that can do that, the Huey Long algorithm.

I am confident that better minds than mine, such as your own, can devise others. After the EIP fork fails, do give it nominal consideration, please.

I agree, I'm not sure if or why this is actually a priority, except when it comes to the victim's of flag wars. Many of which aren't producing bad content, or plagiarizing. They simply are the "bad guys" to the wrong whales.
Not that this is an easy answer but I think the priority should be to attract new users and let the flag wars continue, and hope those good content producers who have been chased off, are replaced by many new ones!

I just fail to see how this change attracts new users in any way... and that should be our focus. Attracting and keeping users, this change likely does the opposite of that in my opinion.

It's been proven that downvotes won't be used responsibly, even when they had a cost.

The same shop. The same chef. The same ingredients. The same taste. The same price. But now, we are wondering how our pizza-shop will be affected if we start cutting it into 6 pieces instead of 8 pieces

Is it going to attract new customers - no
Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no
Will it change the earnings of our pizza shop - no

red button, redistribution, changing ratio authors/curators are not going to create anything measurable. Maybe it can even affect negatively because people will be wondering why on Earth those people are discussing this topic when they have at least 100 more important problems?

Shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. SMTs and communities are the only shot out of this mess at this point, though I think these changes will be a net negative, so even worse than just shuffling the deck chairs.

MIRA and ten thousand 'top' witnesses might be able to help. Decentralization is the cure for centralization, and counters the problem of centralization of tokens that is the source of many of the problems Steem has.

Again, nothing but math...

Stolen from @arcange:

As you can see, the median payout is 0,10 $.
Half of the posts earn less than 0,10 $ per post.

Not a single new user will come here to (*most probably) earn 0,10 $ per day. It's maybe 50 $ per year?!

However, there is something completely different that Steemit could do.

I'll send them the official proposal concerning this :D

"Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no"
I have seen quite a chilling effect on many that I follow. A few of which have been "chased" off and no longer post and have powered down. But your other 2 points I 100% agree. Before they went dark they posted several instances where simple malice were the reason for their flags. Initial content was flagged, they (content creator's) objected, waves of more flags ensued. It had nothing to do w/bad content after the initial flag, which is obviously subjective to begin with...

I think that one of the big things driving away users is new users seeing "shitty" content receiving a big part of the reward shares due to abuse of bots and similar. A downvote pool can be used to discourage bot usage on content which does not deserve to be on the hot or trending page. This guarantees the "quality" of those pages and thus attracts new users in my opinion.

Who defines what's "quality"?

Your premise is that users will use downvotes responsibly even though 3 years of history contradicts that belief.

I don't believe that all users do, but I believe that a significant part of the stakeholders which have significant interest in the platform will try to make a responsible decision for the platform to avoid bad content.
Having, as proposed, a pool similar to 10-25% is not enough for significant abuse (as discussed in the post) but allows the community to action more easily.
If the effect it is going to have is going to be more positive than negative is going to be something we will see.
We'd be stupid to not try though.

Well, there are objective parameters by which you can determine that.
I could give you a dozen examples.
Photography, art, music. There are objective parameters in each category that determine what is quality and what is not.
Even when concerning quality of text....

But thats not the question really. What i find important is the CHOICE...
The most important change Steem needs is that we introduce choice into our content placement.
Maybe the community is stupid and has a shitty taste in content but it should be able to make that choice for itself. Something which it does not right now.

There is no way downvotes will be used responsibly which more than negates any possible benefits.

But here i completely agree. If there was a way to mask who the downvoter is on a post that would do the trick.
Then you would actually see people acting the way they should. Based on their personal convictions.
If you could encrypt, somehow, the downvoter on a post i guarantee you that bad apples like Bernie, FTG, chbartist... etc would be booted off the platform by the time the community realizes that the system works... I would bet every penny of crypto i have that would happen.

Unfortunately it wont and youre left with an idea that only works if youre incapable of assessing human behavior.

Moving the goalposts, you wanted to know how it would help and look, someone who offered the scenario clearly. As for your new argument, everyone defines quality. Your premise is that everyone will act like a Flag troll bot. Tell me, when in the last 3 years have you ever seen everyone act in unison on anything, and do you remember the Whale Experiment when people actually did act in unity AND used downvoting for Months with the encouragement of the community to continue it far after the experiment was to be concluded... Or do you suffer from selective memory that simply acts to confirm your bias that because of your internal dilemma of "por que, quality" relegates an entire function to what is otherwise a marginal use of it, and so you forget that flagging has been probably the most important revitalization the platform has ever known?

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apparently couple of imbeciles will decide what 'quality' is . we should all join forces and slap them with big fat lawsuit

'can' is not will. But few users will deploy their downvotes in a way devs have modeled. Most people don't flag, and won't. Most people that do don't do so for reasons we want them to, but because they're pissed off at what someone said.

That's why this comment will be flagged. That's all the proof we need that this will only make things worse.

That's all the proof you need that it'll make things worse, what one troll acts as is indicative of everyone else, classic nonsense yet again.

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By making self voting more risky and equally bid bots/vote buying people will hopefully see that this place isn't a get rich quick scheme. You were around for the Whale Experiment, do you remember how the place was buzzing when the overpriced whale nonsense was diminished? Now imagine that but not because altruistic, self sacrificing whales act on the lack of linear rewards from the much anticipated hf after it has been overwhelmingly requested by the community, but because numerous people now have free downvotes to check behavior they would have likely passed up because it would have cost them. You are relegating the use of downvoting to a marginal userbase that has proven to be not interested in anything but being trolls, not OK. You can float the idea that downvoting won't be used responsibly all you want but if I'm around I'll gladly make you look foolish by asking you what about the Whale Experiment..

Actually 3 years of history have proven that down votes won't be used responsibly. It will be 95% personal.

Except for the months on end that the Whale experiment was an overwhelming success solely because of flagging. Too bad you think that marginalizing it to literally a handful of bots almost all ran by our notorious @berniesanders troll is "proof" that flagging won't be used responsibly. Let me cue in chetta and sfr and the numerous people who were involved in the Whale Experiment, they make up 5% paltry share.

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Regarding second price auctions, the idea is interesting, but sadly there are simple behaviors that will get around it. If the highest vote gets thrown out, then I will split my stake among more accounts and continue self voting.

Agreed, although the less accounts I use, the more I have to sacrifice, and the more accounts I use, the easier it is for others to detect and counter. This is also why I thought it would be interesting to see what happens if combined with the converged linear curve.

The act of voting itself should have some kind of "reputation". People should be able to freely and openly agree or disagree on people voting, without affecting rewards. The reason for it, in my view, is to publicly make awareness of "less regular" situations. So, if a whale decides to riot and make a specific user lose all the rewards, but in this case the user is someone honest and does not deserve that, then slowly the community might be able to shift the tide, by knowing that the whale downvote is not being accepted by the community, attracting slowly others that which to shift the tide of that whale.

Not sure if I got myself understood.

I appreciate everyone's different ideas on this, and I don't pretend to have a solution, but I don't think this is it, either, if I'm honest. The flag war people are going to flag war as long as flags exist; that's just how they roll. What stops the little guys from flagging isn't the lack of curation rewards - because our curation rewards aren't much to speak of no matter what we do - it's fear of retaliation from a whale. If a person has enough money to buy bot votes that will put their post on trending for hundreds of dollars, they can flag you into oblivion for pinging it with your pennies worth of downvote. Us minnows will likely flag spammers, because the spammers can't flag us to hell, and it doesn't matter if we don't get our teeny tiny maybe a fraction of a Steem curation. I've flagged spammers. My friends have flagged spammers. But flag a whale and you can kiss your rep and your rewards goodbye.

you are playing games with our money kid . just added your ass to the lawsuit list

Why are you obsessed with quantitative evidence? No one can predict what is going to happen to steem after such a change. It's all about trial and error. That's why SMTs are important.

We can try taking an educated guess to make good changes, but those guesses come from experience and not statistical models.

Well said.

Posted using Partiko Android

The blockchain at this point should move out of "testing" phase and into the real world. There's enough real world use-data that could be used that no "test" should ever be conducted so blindly. And I dissent your opinion that this would have no "known" negative affect on the blockchain.

In the meantime, we believe allowing users to have some downvotes without consuming their voting mana is a reasonable solution.

That doesn't sound like a good argument. Unlimited downvoting opens the door to censorship like never before.

This is beyond incorrect since steemit has a ui thing it only greys out posts. There are other frontends to use. This in no way would affect your posts, or how they are posted and if they stay on the chain. steemit is a centralized front end not much to expect from that, don't like it choose a new front end or run the condenser in your own way.

Censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing..."

The relevant portion of Encyclopedia Britannica's definition of censorship definitely includes concealing text and requiring another step to reveal it. It may not be complete eradication of information, but no definition of censorship from any source I've read so defines censorship.

Almost no one has the ability to extract data from the blockchain itself, since almost no one is competent to code their own front end. Not only Steemit so censors speech, but all front ends I am aware of in common use. Telling people to 'run condenser in your own way' is like telling people if they don't like commercially available automobiles to just make their own. Maybe you can build a front end. I bet you can't build a car. I can't do either, because I build houses.

This does affect posts, which is the purpose of doing it.

No, ones competent enough to code a front end?

https://steemprojects.com/

Also, there is an assortment of free projects on github dealing with steem. You can also use many other front ends. Steem isn't censorable but most top layer solutions are because companies have to follow the laws of their home-based countries.

People in the community or more than willing to help with things for no charge if you ask to modify the software. Just don't expect massive overhauls for free.

Curation is never censorship. Ever. Also, where do you get the idea of unlimited downvoting. .

Posted using Partiko Android

Cause he can't read. All he does is spam share to Steem random stuff that could be done in <1 minute multiple times a day. He probably doesn't even read the shit he shares.

you are famous legal expert when it comes to spam, censorship and how much time someone should spend creating post . platform could easily restrict sharing if they want to get rid of it , who are you to impose rules on others ?

Isn't it great? And many follows through.

Hmm, I don't know what to tell ya. shrug.png

I'll ask my question again . Who are you to ban things that are allowed on the platform ?

I don't know? Who are you to allow things on the platform? lol

It's not unlimited. There is a separate (and smaller) supply of downvote mana that limits it.

Number (v) is the question I think you all need to ask yourselves and if you don't have a clear answer you need to devise a system to get some sort of objective feedback to determine if you're spending resources on a problem that's not as much of a problem as it might seem or even if it is a problem if this is the solution people even want.

ie. some sort of poll or questionnaire that is "featured" and ideally curated so people are incentivised to participate.

Unfortunately regardless of opinion and feedback, and the feelings that are involved, it's moot as the only way to know is to try. Many people have voiced resistance to trying it and many have voiced support for it, ultimately though the ones that are against it don't have any argument or position, and they can't because they are not prophets, and without trying we won't have any idea, only opinions built solely out of sentiment.

The logic behind what I'm saying is why spend time and resources on something that nobody wants? Or that a tiny minority want. Getting feedback is free and fast. Maybe the feedback would be overwhelmingly in favor, but without that your just adding features at random.

Features need to be developed around user demand, not just to see if they'll work IMHO.

If only a tiny minority want it then witnesses won't upgrade (and those who do will likely get voted out) and it won't go live.

There has already been some informal consultation (and both recently and in the past some on-chain discussion) with witnesses and large stakeholders which suggest it has a legitimate chance to be adopted, though I also wouldn't rule out that it won't.

With that in mind, if we say it has a (being generous) 30% chance that it wouldn't get approved, are there other features that there is widespread consensus on that have a 90-95% chance of getting approved?

In a nutshell: Will this take time away from Communities or SMT's because that's the stuff EVERYONE wants. Why not just push full Steem ahead on that and after that's out we tweak all this stuff.

Communities are not even a blockchain feature. They are planned to be implemented in hivemind as far as I know, which is a layer on top of the blockchain.

SMTs development isn't finished and I don't know when it is finished, although supposedly that is the next thing to be worked on.

As @baah noted, this particular issue (downvotes) isn't a major coding task either way, but there is a lot of support for some ways of improving the function of the Steem economy.

As far as trying to put percentages on specific features I don't really know. I think it is sufficient that developers don't waste their time on things that have little chance (and that has happened in the past) but I don't really see that here.

Just limit the amount of funds that can be extracted from rewards. Sound investments are invariably based on increasing the value of the investment vehicle, and rewarded by capital gains. Investors have been so encouraged since prehistory, and this is the basic mechanism which has created our extant markets.

That will end bidbots, self-voting, and such without doubt. Ending extracting rewards by manipulating curation will allow curation to actually be based on content quality as judged by individuals, rather than parasitized by profiteers.

Anything else will continue the downward spiral.

I highly doubt that since this is not an overhaul or requires any considerable amount of effort, from my understanding implementing the curve is a matter of a couple of lines of code and the same for the curation rewards, and the downvotes might be a few dozen lines and you have to consider that most of it is implementing what was done to a much lesser extent with the RC, so I'm sure a lot of things are learned and are more or less copy pasting and adjusting the variables.

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"...we won't have any idea, only opinions built solely out of sentiment."

You speak for yourself. As a market research manager in the 1980s, and as an experimental biologist in the 2000s, I learned how to understand data. Throughout that time I maintained successful investments and it is my personal experience that has allowed me to comment cogently and informedly on these matters.

I am not ideologically wed to some dogma, but an iconoclast that speaks from experience. Successful investors with decades of experience do have basis for informed opinions, unlike your textual diarrhea.

What is this about, all your accolades or the fact that you cannot and there exists nothing that can model how these changes will affect the community? You can shine a bullshit all you want Mr experienced market analyst but it ain't about you at all, so go be irrelevant elsewhere why don't you.

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Dude, Steemit Inc doesn't have a CLUE what usability testing is. Even if they did conduct such a poll they wouldn't have any idea how to collate and analyze that data properly.

@vandeberg, I think discussions would be more productive if you had them with witnesses and a couple of guys who thought a lot about steem economics (like @donkeypong or @trafalgar etc..). Opening this discussion to everyone doesn't seem to help, judging by the quality of comments under this post. Just informing the community about the changes would be enough, when and if they will come.

The ability to downvote already creates a dystopia in which those who have the most money can censor those who don't. And now you want to make that easier?

Every single tiny change made to the blockchain and to the mechanics of Steemit send waves of uncertainty through the economy and in the long run is VERY bad for Steem. Stop tinkering. There's only TWO things Steemit Inc should be focusing on

MIRA

PRESS RELEASES

Do you guys even have a marketing director?

steemit_trends.png

Because curation is censorship.

Gawd where do you guys come from with this nonsense?

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Downvoting is curation?????

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Exactly, downvoting rates things. That's curation. That's also free expression, much like booing and jeering is.

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Soooooo... censorship is "free expression". Got it.

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No, censorship is removing or altering content and or suppressing freedom of expression. There is no "freedom to not be curated to the bottom", capiche. Reviewing something as crap, rating something as zero stars, even if it causes the item to be burried at the bottom of the list if items is not censorship, but freedom of expression.

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Psychologically speaking, negative reinforcement is the least effective means of persuasion. If it were, murder would have ceased when death became the punishment.

People who boo and jeer simply have run out of words.

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the problem is not the opinion. The problem is the power law distribution giving the vote a weight. The vote now represents the stake the person voted holds. Not the intelligence, not logic but only the stake.

And why should the stake leverage your opinion? Why is that beneficial for exploring quality content and making social decisions within the DAO? It isn't. One person -one vote --> equal distribution of the social layer --> counteracting the clustering in the 21 Witness dPOS System = effective decentralisation.

This is exactly would those people don't get. Decentralization is a binary property (either you have a central authority or you dont). Distribution is vanilla. The redundancy comes from a combination of both properties.

when you have a decentralized dPOS System with 21 super-representatives but without equal distribution of power --> you end up with a consortium chain/ a concentrated piece of shit. But they don't get it :)


the inventor of Steem gets it, but what does he know?

That is not true at all.

https://www.psychestudy.com/behavioral/learning-memory/operant-conditioning/reinforcement-punishment/negative-punishment

Furthermore, laws weren't ever intended to prevent crime. Get that nonsense out of here. Punishment is not to prevent but to repremand. Laws are there to punish not to prevent.

It does not matter why you think that people boo and jeer, strawman, all that is important and relevant is that they are free to do so and it never becomes censorship.

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Explain how this is "curation":

It does not give too many additional resources to users that will use/abuse all that we give them and frees up normal users that may not be downvoting to do so without financial penalty.

No, explain how expressing dislike is censorship. Go.

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A big enough down vote causes the post to be hidden. "Duh"

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Hidden is not censorship, especially when you can easily reveal it and it's the most intriguing item among the rest of the items, conspicuous since no other items have a BUTTON THAT SAYS 'REVEAL'. If you consider that censorship that's fine, no critical thinking, rational individual in my opinion will conclude that the item is censored when nothing is altered and anyone, I mean anyone, can very easily see the item and essentially it's more curiosity peaking than all other items by it's very "censorship".

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Enough targeted downvoting from big enough accounts would cause anyone to leave Steemit. How is that NOT censorship? Go:

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Not me. I welcome it and I'm happy to be the most interesting item, distinguished as "hidden", and completely understand the Streisand Effect which is exactly why I never whined even about the Flag Wars and flags I received. No ammount of booing and jeering is censorship. No ammount of thumbs down, negative reviews is censorship, 8t's actually the opposite, it's freedom of expression.

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p.s. I'm not the one downvoting you. I don't really downvote as I don't see the point in it. And honestly I would rather people could see your side of the conversation so it's actually quite unfortuante that all your comments have been downvoted in this way.

I'm not bothered, the people who have a sense of curiosity will seek out my comments first. I know why I got downvoted, I told @berniesanders to eat a dick twice, once on his own post and once on the steemit blog post about the Keychain being merged into condenser. The point is, ironically, that no one can censor you. There are numerous people who self censor so they don't tag @berniesanders, others who won't even dare to mention him, @berniesanders, but the fact remains that he isn't forcing them, and that censorship isn't someone booing or jeering at you, or someone rating you poorly, or making you comment hidden. I know, I have been censored by numerous people for speaking the truth in the face of their lies on Facebook, I was censored on there by Facebook as well before it was the cool status of rebels the world over. I have no delusion about what censorship is and despite being flagged by @berniesanders with his bots numerous of times, I will still defend his right to jeer and boo, even if I don't agree with it.

I think you should really consider what downvoting is. It's a form of punishment, and punishment is a very, if not the most potent form of negative behavior modification that exists. Yes encouragement and rewards benefit positive behavior, but no ammount of it will curb negative behavior. Downvoting is also the best, most effective way to make people who are primarily here for rewards, to rethink their approach to steem, especially if they are leeching, since such behavior will undermine everyone's rewards given enough time and enough leeching. So downvote, and even threaten to do so, the point of it should only be lost on people like me, who see rewards as a bonus but not a necessity since speaking the truth is my reward.

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Hiring an actual economist might be a good idea too.

@RT-international came, they were not able to make any news out of that extraordinary chance...

I'm not surprised at all.

First of all, thank you for all the countless hours, hard work, blood and sweat you have put into this blockchain. You are truly a technological genius. In fact, this place seems to be filled with quite a few technological geniuses. There are also many brilliant scientific and logical minds.

Unfortunately, what seems to be missing around here are geniuses in the field of human behavior. This idea is a prime example of the lack of expertise in how humans typically behave. This idea seems to hinge on the premise that the people who interact with the blockchain and the content on it will act in a logical way that will benefit the platform as a whole. During the three years I have been here, I have seen no evidence that the majority of people will act this way. There is much evidence to the contrary. People have acted in their own personal short term interest. That is why we have the problems with content that we do.

This idea also implements a system that rewards negativity. I am no expert on human behavior either, but this does not seem like a way to attract masses of people.

Actually I am going to stop. I am not an expert in human behavior. Before doing something so drastic, I hope the team consults with someone who truly understands if this idea will be more likely to attract people to or repel them from the platform.

I understand the value of "you will never know unless you try", but with so much on the line, I would hope the team would do a tremendous amount of research and consult with experts in this area before firing blindly.

I would imagine you would laugh if an expert on human behavior came in and started messing with your code. The converse should also be true. This blockchain is a technological masterpiece, but it has zero value if people do not use it. You have built it, now you need an expert to show you how to get the masses to want to use it.

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