RE: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Let's all step back and figure out what can be done to stop LOSING STEEM USERS
Does Patreon require the ability for users to remove someone's funding when you dislike them? No, you vote with your dollars by funding who you like and that is the extent to your power. Downvotes are in no way a requirement for the system, that is a religious stance some are taking here. It is foolishness because #NewSteem is less populated, less valuable and has more disgruntled people ditching it than old Steem because the bot votes didn't go away, they just switched to the downvote control tool.
Upvotes are a way of supporting financially those that you believe are worthy of it and it is proportional to your investment, that is as far as it needs to go. No, we do not need to control how others vote, including self-votes. Why? Because your votes are personal decisions that do have an impact on the overall value of the network, but only proportional to your risk. So, people acting foolish with their votes is fine because the damage is limited to the amount of money they have sunk into the network.
Having downvote control is similar to a neighborhood organization that starts giving home owners rules. True freedom loving people despise this sort of domination over people, forcing people to do with their own property what the organization wants and not what the owner wants. That's not decentralized freedom, that's more tyrannical governance.
Yep, you are exactly right. The downvote button is a weapon for negatively much more than it is tool for accurately valuing content.
The downvote needs to go, or at least go to a handful of (paid) moderators.
Clearly Patreon and Steem operate differently.
On Steem you make a post and the audience (community) reacts for 7 days. They can upvote and downvote and at the end of the week, you get to keep the balance. That's all there is to it. If you don't like how it works that's fine. I fully acknowledge it is never going to be for everyone.
I disagree, I believe Steem is very similar in its overall purpose to Patreon. I have always thought that a mature Steem would not be as much a replacement for Reddit as it would be a replacement of Patreon.
Think what you want, but this open, universal upvote/downvote system has been recognized by Steemit Inc. to be a problem. It will either be changed or Steem will experience a slow death. Its a terrible idea to give people online that are anonymous such influential power simply for being well off. The solution is the removal of PoB for STEEM and to make it exclusively about RCs. At this point, PoB needs to be an SMT thing alone.
Are you really saying that you would like to do away with voting which carries a financial reward? Or have I got that wrong?
I don't understand why you think that removing a concept like proof of brain would make any difference ?
Steem-power-delegation is vastly superior to pa.treon.
Voting is basically worthless for the majority of steemians (small fish).
I'm not telling you an opinion. I am telling you how it is designed.
I get that some of the downvotes are mean spirited, I get that some of them are dumb. I get that they make some sad and mad.
I don't think you get how Steem works.
You can make a pretty picture about how you wish it works, but there are some pieces you just aren't understanding.
I know perfectly how Steem works. You really think its text storage is all that valuable? No one cares, for some, its an inconvenience.
Its the PoB system that makes it interesting. Still, Steemit Inc. in a rather recent post commented that it is unfair for a PoB system to be universal for all topics and communities. PoB how it works today does not work well at all.
PoB has potential, but its designed wrong right now. Free downvotes also tilts the atmosphere to a negative energy rather than a positive energy.
Also, I have explained to you why your argument for downvotes makes no sense. Your idea is the same idea made by neighborhood associations that try to control people and not let them do what they want with their own property. Its socialism essentially, wherein you never truly own your own property because others get to tell you what you must do with it.
The same principles are applied to downvotes. The only reason you want downvotes is to be able to hurt someone that does with their own STEEM what you dislike. But they really can't hurt the network, because they can only do as much harm to the network as they add to the network market cap.
Allow me to explain in more detail. Imagine someone buys 1 million STEEM and powers it up. All this person wants to do is upvote their own posts. Are they hurting the network? Nope, in fact, they are a net positive.
This person locked up a lot of STEEM, increasing the value of STEEM by reducing its circulating supply. This person cannot be hurting the network because they can only take the percentage of the reward pool equal to the value they add by staking. Every STEEM staked (powered up) increases the value of the circulating supply, which is why the staked STEEM receives inflation as a reward.
Now, you argue that they do hurt it by not upvoting high quality content. But they have no obligation to do that, and they are not really hurting the network by upvoting whatever they prefer to upvote because they are actually already a net positive by staking.
This idea that they MUST upvote content based on merit is a coercive, tyrannical position that is completely in opposition to the liberty and right of free action promised by decentralized systems.
So again, what is the downvote for? It is so that you have the power to force others to do what you want. Because every staked individual is a net positive, the downvote button is not essential. It does not matter how many times people try to repeat that it is essential, as a matter of fact, it is not.
'Proof of brain' is meant to require brain, not wallet. That alone doesn't justify control, but it does demonstrate how proof of brain and thus the rest of the network are negatively impacted by upvoting garbage. I made a post on this kind of topic here, recently.
This topic really seem to "touch you" @blake.letras :)
I think he makes a great point here. The downvote has been rationalized until its supporters are blue in the face but the reality is simply that it is far too negative to work as intended. The user metrics basically speak for themselves. Very few want to endure the negativity even if there is money involved.
Remove downvotes, user activity will sky rocket, more people will come, the price of steem will go up, and steemit,inc will earn more ad revenue.
Dear @planter
Thank you for dropping by and sharing your view on that particular issue.
I've visited your profile just to learn,that you never posted anything. And yet you have 10k SP. It's quite confusing :) Are you fully into curating only?
Yours
Piotr