RE: STEEM: The Disproportionate Power Balance with Downvotes
Yes, I agree with the assessment of the problem. Few people seem to be willing to acknowledge the problem the last hard fork presented. No repercussions against abuse of downvote power is a broken feature. Smart downvoters often create separate accounts for downvoting only, with no comments or posts of their own to interact with.
Rather than put their stake at risk, I think a more reasonable solution would be to put their downvotes at risk. There should be a mechanic to partially silence/weaken annoying downvoters temporarily by casting a counteractive downvote. Perhaps by a feature allowing people to go to the abusive profile and downvote to remove their allotment of daily downvotes. It would require an equal amount of stake to totally silence/weaken the staked downvotes of an abuser.
Not sure if this would work. It might renew the power of bidbots, undoing the "solution" of the last hardfork that beat bidbots. I will support any direction steem wants to head that better protects the legevity of active/honest/quality at authors. At the moment, I think disproportionate downvote power is one of the biggest obstacles for new users.
Remember, downvote communities are forming that downvote and reward eachother for profit when a member flags and reports a "crime". We rely on the good judgement of these members to flag fairly, and to refrain from flagging excessively for greedy profit. Eventually anyone with enough collective community power can enforce their own downvote rules without any repercussions. Diversity of thoughts on steem eventually becomes nonexistent.
This does sound like an interesting notion. The idea that a community could band together to reduce the effects of a errant downvoter is a good idea. After all, it is the sort of banding together that shows that a greater group of people think that that sort of behaviour is more anti-social and counter to the good value of STEEM.
However, like you said, it is a solution with probably unintended consequences... like every change to every system...
Yes disproportionate downvoting is a real problem. Perhaps there should be something to restrict the power to accounts of the same size... that way, if people want to play downvote wars, they can... and stay in the same weight class. Perhaps a certain proportion of the downvote (depending on the relative account sizes) is free, and then the rest would have to be "funded".
Every thing you suggested has glaringly obvious flaws, "unintended circumstances" as you call it but squared. Think, everything gets 2, 3, or n times more complex in order to, what? Outwit someone determined enough to respond as they do, poignantly put by being a jerk? All the while, now downvoting got even more tasking, because who doesn't love to take out the trash all the time all for the far off promise of having a better community, except now the flag police will get you if you're not big enough or gosh help you if you're bigger.
It comes down to this:
You don't think that good stake can win vs bad stake when it comes to retaining or onboaring users, and that somehow, with more rules or whatever, the good can win.
I think that the good outweighs the bad so much so that it was never a chance for bad to win, immemorial loser underdogs.
Agreed... everything that I suggested would have unintended consequences... glaring obvious depends on the perspective.....
However, it would be incredibly naive to think that the status quo doesn't also have some unintended consequences as well... things sort of work as they are, but is that due to a stable situation and inventives that can scale up (which I believe that you think?) or is it due to the fact that at the moment we are tiny and the effects of good actors can match the bad as it is all relatively easy to keep track of (as I think...).
I'm not against downvoting as a concept and I'm not advocating a flag police either. However, I do believe the mere principle of no consequence actions is not really something that should exist in an adult society (or even a child one!).
No, I think good stake can win... as long as it always remains "good"... however, this is like having a benevolent dictator... it is good, until it is bad. I don't think there should be more rules or anything like that as such... I think that there should be a risk and consequence for actions like upvoting and downvoting... instead of free (rc doesn't count, as that is essentially unlimited), as freedom from cost and consequences has not played out well in the financial sectors of modern times! Crash the economy, who goes to jail? Who gets bailed out? Who loses their jobs? Who gets the golden handshake? We don't want to re-create the idea of consequence free hazards... or do we?
I think Good Vs Bad scales somewhat perfectly proportionate, but it seem you think that isn't the case, that it's relatively like so (good vs bad) because we are tiny. I guess the only thing is to wait and see.
I don't think that you've accurately considered what you're suggesting. You seem to think that forcing people to spam a post or a comment every so many minutes so that they can continue to be jerks will make that spam post or comment some kind of insurance, that now the benefit of retaliating against them will change something. I don't see how that could be the case, considering that being Downvoted is of no consequence to them to not be a jerk, they can keep on being a jerk even if they are downvoted, how could that be consequential at all, unless consequences don't mean anything, or mean so little.
Um, I think you've confused my suggestion with someone else's. I agreed with them about it being an interesting idea but one that I didn't think would work due to the points that you also said. However, I answered so many replies I might well have accidentally agreed to the wrong thing by accident. Anyway, my position on requiring a post of comment to upvote or downvote is exactly the end as yours.
My suggestion was that up/down voting gave some sort of cost... Perhaps proportional to the amount of vests that would be allocated. However, this would mean that downvotes cost disproportionately more as there would not be any 'anti-curation' rewards. But I think that these actions shouldn't be effectively cost free.
Edit: Yup, definitely my fault! Apologies. I had answered without making myself clear. I think I had made those points (same as yours) in a different thread... Somewhere.