RE: Clarification for some people RE: Flag vs Down Vote
The flagging system needs to be removed or made so it does not effect rewards at all. We will never see bigger name people with controversial opinions make a home on steemit just based on this principle alone. Can you imagine if someone like Sargon Of Akkad were to consider this platform? He would instantly dismiss it the second he learned some SJW can mass downvote his posts into oblivion.
The fact that the people who added the flagging system at all dont understand how it can and will be weaponized is very sad. I say that there should be a way to downvote stuff but it should be cosmetic in nature.
Also hiding posts from me is childish, I personally gain NOTHING from having to have extra clicks added to see a post that was hidden due to low score. That is not only insulting to ME as the unlooker but its fucking annoying as hell.
I FUCKING DECIDE WHAT I WANT TO SEE. NOT YOU, NOT ANYONE ELSE. I DO! ME!
Got it?
I am fine with the REVEAL for NSFW post but hiding is stupid. If I want it hidden I'll MUTE them.
I do think the down vote should have no effect on rewards. Though the counter here is then that Imagine Bernie then wrote a post of his, commented on his own post, up voted his comment 100%, commented again, up voted that one 100%, etc. Could also do multiple posts, or just up vote his posts from his other accounts.
Pretty soon he has an exponentially growing flood of income from this process and there is no way to counter it.
That is the ONLY legitimate reason for a down vote to impact rewards that I can think of.
Now if we had a reliable mechanism for reporting abuse and that abuse resulted in payouts being reduced to zero that might work.
The key think here is that the goal is to remain decentralized. That is partially what makes the problem more challenging. Creating a central group, or people that have a job of handling the abuse actually CAN centralize power if we are not careful. In such cases it could be possible to take control and censor, restrict the blockchain.
We don't want this. Which makes the problem more challenging because "traditional" techniques used in a centralized environment may not work as well here.
I would prefer the down vote have ZERO impact on rewards. Yet, due to the exploit and gaming opportunity that opens as I presented above that is not feasible yet. Trying to find a way to make that feasible without adding centralization is a goal worth pursuing I believe.
I've been a proponent of Up Votes only for a long time. Until that exploit became clear. Yet really I don't care about down votes other than the fact they cancel out the interest of other people as though that interest does not exist. So if they kept down votes and it had zero impact on rewards then I'd be pretty satisfied.
As far as the reward pool... let it balance itself based upon what people are interested in, not based upon a war for which ideas people are allowed to be interested in.