RE: What keeps you from using your daily free downvotes?
Hi Abigail,
thank you for joining the poll and for sharing your take on the matter.
Your judgement on allowing free downvotes appears logical under your premise that they are an instrument of punishment. My understanding of downvotes, however, is fundamentally different. Let me try to explain.
Downvotes express the request of a stakeholder to correct the current proposal for the reward of a contribution. Just like an upvote does. When someone hits the publish button on Steem, the community of stakeholders is called to review and modify a constantly changing proposal for the reward of that post. This review goes on over a period of 7 days and it deals with nothing else but a proposal. There is nothing to give, nothing to take, nothing to reward, nothing to punish. It’s just collecting stake-weighted input to come up with a final consensus on what the actual payout should be. No one should feel entitled to receive what a proposal suggests at any time within this 7d period. Because it’s subject to change until it’s final.
Now, to engage in this review stakeholders have only three possibilities to express their view. Upvote, Downvote and No vote. And now I get to the point. What happens to this review if one expression comes at a cost while another doesn’t? In other words, how will the outcome of this review change if one as to pay for saying „less“ while getting payed for saying „more“. No way this could work out. And we were all able to convince ourselves for a long time that it didn’t.
Even now after the introduction of the EIP these three ways to engage in the reward proposal review are incentivized differently, since only one of them offers curation rewards. Still, taking away at least the penalty on the downvote has gone a long way towards improving reward evaluation and thus content discovery.
Reintroducing a cost on downvotes will again take them out of the set of expressions we have in said review and would turn our shared community pool back into the self-service shop it was for a too long time.
Needless to say that the above is all my personal take on the matter. Thanks again for sharing yours.
(I take the liberty of tagging a few of the other commenters here, since what I wrote here might be an adequate response to their input too.
@don-t @roleerob @xpilar @ianballantine @flysky @siphon @wulff-media @purplealyss @cflclosers @lighteye @gamemods @suntree @agmoore @gunnarheilmann)
Thank you @shaka for this explanation of your thoughts about this issue, I mostly agree with you, but as long as bots and voting-trails do this jobs (it doesn´t matter if in positive or negative way) it is unacceptable because it also leads to abuse.
This has happened in the last few weeks.
It can't be that it's allowed to automate something like this, especially if the accounts with the most power are trying to play the regulators on both sides.
This clearly shows again the biggest system error on Steemit, the missing balance between 1Mio SP and 10, 100 or 1000SP.
Even if I take your example from our conversation where it was said that many small accounts together also reach an respectable SP, so I must admit with a little distance that exactly the same is true for the large accounts so the mismatch can be very easily restored.
There would have to be a ban which limits e.g. a delegation basically to a maximum of 100K SP, so that these pool formations would be extremely difficult to establish and thus the abuse almost excluded completely in contrast to the current state.
It is bad enough if an account with a SP power of more than 500k or 1 Mio decides to vote a contribution down because he does not like it or he thinks it would be overvalued, this can not be corrected, there is no regulative for it.
So in order to make this community one under equal, a few rules should be changed in the interest of all.
And only then steemit and steem might finally be able to raise and play out their enormous potential, also for the benefit of all members of this incredible community.
Guess that´s the goal to fight for, nothing else is worth it isn´t it ?
Good afternoon @shaka,
Thank you for taking the time to share your views here with me/us :) I found it very insightful and it has definitely provided me with a different angle from which to approach this topic.
Best,
Abigail.