Opposing Perceptions, mismatched definitions, parity mismatch, voting, down voting, and "fairness"
Having said several times I do not understand the down vote and a reason for it, I finally believe I have determined WHY I am having trouble grasping this and other people are not.
@dantheman wrote another piece today concerning our corrupt sense of fairness that is worth reading. I also wrote a voting related post a couple of days ago Now we can declare people enemies.
In that post I expressed that I truly could not see a positive value add for a down vote. I was not referring to a flag to remove plagiarism, spam, and abusive posts. I was referring to a down vote for any reason other than those.
I think I have answered my own question
It is a matter of perceptions and how people view steemit. There are a number of perceptions. Here are some that I believe exist.
- It is similar to reddit and other social media. They vote that way, so should we.
- It is similar to a boardroom of a company, or a political popularity contest
- It is a free market for ideas and content we produce
My difficulty in understanding the down vote is that I view steemit as being a free market. I will explain how this causes a conflict with the idea of a down vote.
Free Market Perspective
In a free market people purchase your products (services or goods) due to a desire for the product and if you have competitors and people still purchase from you it is simply because you are offering something that was more important to them personally.
So when bringing a new product to market, people will often do a market analysis. It is important to know if there is a market so you can determine pricing, can determine if there is even enough interest to pursue the creation of the product or not.
This also does not have to be purely financial. I can consider what is motivation for me. It could be the payment, it could be the chance to talk with other people and share my ideas, or it could be a combination of both.
In my market analysis I may determine that X number of people are interested in my product. If X is sufficient for whatever reasons I may have to bring the product to market I do so. Whether Y people do not like my product is irrelevant as all I am really interested in is how many consumers for my product there are.
A down vote on steemit violates this market concept (at least the way it currently exists). A person has worked on accumulating steem power and now their vote is worth let's say $10. They vote on my product because they like it. On steemit someone else that does not like my product can come and down vote it to a much lower value. This is a VERY bad thing in a market themed perception.
It is like 10 people buying my product for $10 and someone coming along and saying "your product sucks" and knocking $9 off of the price of MY product before it gets to the register. So now 10 people who thought it was worth the price they were willing to pay get the product for $1. This makes any market analysis I did earlier totally invalidated NOT due to market demand, but simply because the power of this down vote introduces something completely alien to the market.
So what about the boardroom, stake holder perspective?
Boardroom, Stakeholder perspective
Your steem power is a form of representation of VESTS in the steem blockchain. It does make you a stake holder.
As such it could be possible to view every piece of content on steemit (or the blockchain) as being something that needs board approval to receive much or any recognition.
In such a case a yes, or no vote is the norm. A negative vote does have meaning in such an environment.
Technically, we are all stake holders and you could argue this is the case. How many people have spent much time in boardrooms?
Are we electing representatives or presidents here?
This perspective totally does make a negative vote work. Yet, I was totally not viewing steemit as a boardroom. Thus, when looking at it from a market perspective the negative vote and the consequences from it appear very much like theft and absolutely not a free market.
Like other places
Reddit has down votes and up votes (though down vote is eliminated from some channels). It also has a separate REPORT POST mechanism for abuse, spam, plagiarism.
Yet predominantly the negative vote does exist most places. It often results in massive censorship on certain channels (reddits) and people have to seek out sub-reddits if they wish to be able to speak. This means you pretty much have difficulty having any civil discourse with people that disagree with you. Yes, it does happen but for the most part it is very much like wading into trench warfare.
Do we truly want steemit to emulate that? Do we need to? Why did some sub-reddits deem it worth removing the down vote?
Conclusion
I will not tell any of you that you are right or wrong on this. I am an Anarcho-Capitalist and I have strong beliefs in the ideas of a free market. This is truly how I view steemit. A free market for ideas. Such an environment has no reason for a down vote, it doesn't really matter in terms of a market.
Yet I do know there are many people that disagree and they deem steem/steemit as something different.
I knew @ned is a strong Austrian Economist, and I knew @dantheman is an Anarcho-Capitalist (hearsay?). So I believe it was natural that I would drift to viewing steemit as a free market for content and ideas.
I may have been wrong. Perhaps we need to define what we wish to market it as so that when we are convincing people to come here they are not coming here with the wrong perceptions.
I do not see this problem going away as long as the down vote has such visible repercussions to payout and to reputation. It doesn't really do either of those things on reddit, yet people still react with anger to down votes.
I could change my mind, if steemit is not destined to be a free market for content and ideas then I could see rationalization for a down vote, yet that means I'll need to rethink what I was thinking the purpose was.
I am very much an austrian economist and anarcho capitalist with full support for voluntarism. I am also dealing with the limits of game theory.
I don't like down votes, I would prefer for the whole system to be positive. A downvote is really a more efficient way of saying "upvote everything else but X".
Absent downvotes, all manner of abuses are possible. So while I agree with your desire for an "upvote" only system, it is like asking for "world peace".
I can try for "world peace"... though it is a hard problem. :) Like I said I view my Devil's Advocate stuff with you as trying to make the system better. I know you cannot do everything and some problems are pretty "hard". Yet I also know you likely prefer people to be honest with you and not just agree. :) All of the articles you have written have been well thought out. You gave me a lot to think about. Thinking about is not the same as coding it though, so I realize you have a very hard task.
Thanks for saying that. I'd only heard it from other people so my "hearsay" reference was because I had only heard it from others and could not confirm it. It was not meant to imply that you were not. (don't know if you saw it that way or not but I realized after the fact it might come off that way).What kind of abuses do you view as possible that couldn't be solved by a flag with spam, plagiarism, or abusive as options?
Truly would like to know as I haven't seen those. Feel free to use that maybe as a topic for another one of your blog posts. :)
I agree, people should have to have the option to reward and punish, but without using force. The steemit system utilizes this concept perfectly, in the voluntarist way.
It's their opinion, if they like something, they promote it, if they don't then they downvote it. It's the only way to keep steemit full of high quality content and remove spam.
I don't usually think in terms of absolutes, so while it is a way. I know it is not the ONLY way. You could remove SPAM by allowing a downvote/flag/report post that popped a selection menu with a very limited amount of options for which it could be used.
It is a more distributed opinion based system. It's much better if the community removes spam, than if 1 moderator. It tunes more into the demand of the readers, and it removes the possibility of a corrupted moderator (one that downvotes competitors).
Take a look at the market image you used. Notice how some products are on the bottom shelf and some are at eye level? Are you familiar with how that process works? Perception plays a huge role in our choices. The world is not a meritocracy in a vacuum. The paid position on the shelf matters as to how well it will sell (that's why there's a market for shelf position).
I could go along with you in the thinking that there's no process (that I know of) to take away from the price of a product at the register, like your example, but I do have to wonder how the shelf position impacts the brand and the price which can be charged. Is it a "downvote" for the market owner to choose to put something on the bottom shelf or is it just a matter of organizing all the upvotes until someone is left as the looser on the bottom shelf?
I think Steemit is a boardroom based on the code. In addition, it can function as a free market, but a market where value isn't determined until the community has been given an opportunity, via a 24 hour voting period, to discover a price. In a market, if someone isn't willing to pay the higher price, are they "downvoting" but putting a lower bid on the books? I can picture it that way. It's the negotiation of price ("No, that's too much." / "Sorry, this is too valuable to me and you will have to pay more to buy it.") which gives us price discovery required for market activity. Should it only be 0 or + instead of 0, +, and -? I don't know. Will we get more accurate price discovery without the -?
Yes I understand how the market/process works. Yet shelf position can also be determined without a negative vote. In fact I don't know of a negative vote in the market. Those shelf positions are more determined by supply and demand, which is that there is a demand that requires such quantities, and visibility is often tied to how often that product moves. You can accomplish all of this with not voting, or positive votes. Not voting is equivalent to the person that has no interest in the product. It is just a numerical scale, which means you can determine prioritization, popularity, etc. You do not require a negative vote for that. All the negative vote does is alter the nature of the scale. It is basically taking the concept of whole numbers which can be graphed and presented as a scale and instead switching them to integers which have a negative component. Yet I can take integers and whole numbers and with some simple math represent the same image with either of them.
- yes due to VESTS it indeed is this. Yet does it need to function the same way as a boardroom? We are afterall treading some new ground here and I do indeed think they have created a new paradigm. That also means we do not necessarily have to do things the same way as things are done in the past.This could be applied to the market analogy as well. Yet my purpose is NOT to bash steem/steemit, I very much doubt I'll ever do that. I do see it is in beta and I view this as submitting bug reports and trying to find solutions. I know you've seen it's vast potential and so have I. We are at the proverbial tip of the iceberg. One of the things that has amazed me has also been the civility of this place. I never saw anything I viewed as hostility on steemit until I saw the impact that a negative vote can have on people. I view this as a continual perception issue that is only going to get more and more vocal as more people join us and down vote wars break out and unlike reddit where people often get really upset about down votes, here it will also visibly impact financial earning potential (as it currently stands) and I think that is going to be a force multiplier on how angry people are due to the down votes.
That's an excellent point. Though a downvote may be mathematically equivalent to an upvote, just on a different scale, it's the perception that matters and can cause frustration.
Indeed. Which I was NOT viewing it as a boardroom. I was viewing as a market, so I totally could not fathom why anyone would need a down vote. Until today when reading Dan's post it was clear he was viewing it more as a boardroom type situation. Everything became clear then.
For me it has not been about being anti-down vote. I just truly could see no benefit to it simply because I was viewing it as a market for content and ideas.
I'm never going to get ANY sleep if you guys keep posting !
ANOTHER great post, another great list of comments !
It is such a bitch being months behind , SO MANY great post AND comments ... omg i need sleep !
Very well put! I had a post that went invisible within an hour or so of posting it due to a "dolphin" downvoting it, and the post contained only self produced content. This individual never spoke up about why they downvoted; it happened and my post was gone from the feed.
I have only ever downvoted one time, and it was for obvious plagiarism. I have the same stance that you do with this supposedly meant to be a free-market.
I view our posts as filing bug reports while this platform is in beta. I also view them as constructive criticism. I believe this platform is absolutely amazing and has a strong possibility of altering the global paradigm as we know it. Yet that doesn't mean I don't think it could be better. Eliminating as much hostility as possible I believe is a very desirable goal.
Now I haven't been long on reddit, a little over a year. Some of your points I would like to address.
Subs cannot "remove" the downvote function, only make the arrows invisible via CSS. Disabling stylesheets in the preferences will bring them back to any user.
And the other thing is that it doesn't help much to retreat from the default subs into more specialized ones. /r/conspiracy and /r/911truth for example, even fringe like /r/flatearth and /r/geocentrism are closely monitored and frequently vote brigaded by dedicated subs like /r/SRS, /r/TMOR and other thought police.
Now the same thing is happening here. Have you ever noticed that @dots is posting a new dot in #dots every day? I have seen it once or twice in
created, that was it. Now people are flagging @dots and inciting downvote brigades, because "it may be funny, but it doesn't add value". And I found that terribly disturbing.The Vote Wars will be inevitable.
The problem will solve itself as soon as future interfaces allow a short analysis on the voting character of other users; it might be even more damning than the "rep". Already, RES allows you to "tag" users you interact with... wait for the Steemit Enhancement Systems that will come! And imagine they are crowd-sourced and decentralized in a sidechain...
I do think there will be a lot of alternate ways to interact with the blockchain. As to reddit... I've been using it for about 5 years. I've seen things shift and change there quite a bit. I have 170 Post Karma, and 6199 Comment Karma. So I am familiar with it.
I am unfamiliar with @dots and what is occurring with them. You may want to link me to some post that explains that situation or I may just need to check out the #dots tag.
I tended (prior to steem) to hang our in r/libertarian, r/anarcho_capitalism, r/conspiracy, r/gaming, r/pcmasterrace, r/linuxmasterrace, r/gamedev, r/unity3d, r/energy, and miscellaneous others... also have r/news and r/worldnews in my feed but didn't tend to post much in them. r/technology I would post and comment in occasionally.
Funny, I just published my take on @dan's most recent article. Hope you don't mind if I share it here!
PS - If you want to share yours on my post I don't mind!
I took you up on your offer.
A free market does not magically sustain itself. It is not a stable equilibrium that nature somehow automatically gravitates to at all times.
The standard example are monopolies that, once they have emerged, effectively destroy the free market in one particular segment. Hence the emergence of cartel laws etc.
Yeah I don't really care about that in this particular context. I am talking about how people decide upon producers/consumers. This negative vote in any market and the effect it has in steemit.com right now really boils down to the analog of theft and or government intervention and deciding some product should not exist even if some people actually are interested in the products.
I did not use the comparison to illicit discussions about communism, socialism, monopolies, etc. I would be willing to have a discussion on another blog post if you want to make one, let me know about it, and I will reply to you there. :)
I think the downvote discussions miss the point to some extent. Apparently downvotes are (amongst others) used to address the issue of large payouts that are seen as "unfair" (there, the word again) by some.
But that merely tries to cure the symptoms of a deeper disease: Namely that the reward distribution in Steemit is too strongly skewed. In economic terms, its Gini coefficient is far too high.
I feel that softening the distribution needs to be discussed, not its casino symptoms.
{We hit the nesting/reply limit]
I can see that.
I also see anything I post that is criticizing the platform as me filing a bug report since we are in beta and that would imply we might be able to improve some things.
I have not been negatively hit by down voting. I have seen people who can. I absolutely despise what it's results are on reddit.
It is potentially worse here due to the ding to reputation and the loss of potential earnings.
That is going to be a continual powder keg. Don't you think? (question just applied to the powder keg... not expecting agreement on the rest)
I think downvoting only becomes a perennial powder keg if the inequality in the reward distribution remains as high as it is now. In a less extreme scenario where neither a single upvote nor a single downvote carry such an excessive weight people will probably be rather meh about it.
Yes, I can see that as being an issue. I expect the rewards to decrease rather dramatically as the population increases. If I am willing to pay X amount for something it really shouldn't matter whether someone NOT purchasing the object agrees with that price or not.
Yet, there is a difference here that is kind of new and unique. I am NOT actually paying anyone for this as it does not deduct from my own funds. It still has the perception issue of SEEMING like paying to people.
I also know some people down vote because all of the funds are pulled from new steem entering the platform and if large payouts happen somewhere it impacts the trickle down payouts that every other steem power holder gets for simply doing nothing.
This is a VERY new thing. It is definitely a paradigm shift, and we are experiencing pains as should be expected in a beta. I do not post out of malice. I truly want this to succeed and philosophy aside perception does matter. How do you think the majority of people coming on here and posting and seeing they are going to get even $10, and then someone down votes and now they get $1. I believe most people will view it as a hostile act.
Whether they are correct or not, is not what I am getting at. I am only pointing this out as a matter of perception. How then will they react?
This is indeed a tough problem and I know Dan and Ned are in a tricky situation. They have already potentially changed the world. How far can we take it?
I'll be a bit blunt (and maybe a bit unfair to the founders): What we see on Steemit are the results of runaway non-linear effects. In this case, they were deliberately built as the n^2 rule into the platform but I am not sure the implications were properly understood.
It is human nature to lack a reliable gut feeling for non-linearity. The classic example is the water lily on a pond that doubles in size every day until the whole pond is covered after 30 days. Very few people correctly answer the question "when was half the pond covered"? They might guess day 15, when, in reality, it is day 29.
I chose the wrong tier to respond to for your last response... it is one of my top level comments. I did respond though.... my response to you was instead posted to myself. :)
Without downvotes there is no way to police. Like it or not, all societies require policing to function.
Downvotes also mitigate bad whale attacks.
Sure there is. It's called the flag. Use it to report abusive, spam, and plagiarism. Even reddit if you go look at it has a REPORT mechanism. It is the words REPORT POST right below any comment/post.
I do know we need that. I have not advocated not having that. I do not see us needing a down vote due to someone disliking something, or thinking someone should not be able to pay another person X amount.
People already get pretty upset with down votes on places like reddit. I believe adding in the visible drop in financial earnings is likely to turn into a force multiplier for that anger.
Hmmm.... so if the penalty for speeding was to be reported rather than fined, do you think enforcement would be effective? Without an economic penalty I think the vast majority of bad actors would not be deterred from bad actions.
And report to whom? And what are 'they' going to do about the reports? Do we report to centralized authority who then censors the offender? That's how reddit rolls and some of their moderators are swine.
"Downvoting is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
See what I did there? :D
The problem is... you are still talking about reporting. I am talking about down votes on posts simply because you disagree with them, or don't think they are worth as much as someone else wanted to pay them. We still need a reporting mechanism and yes it should FINE them.
We do have this and it is even shaped like a flag. However, it is being used to penalize people due to opinion.
That is from my blog post.
I can speak from experience on this point - one of my posts made No. 1 on the front page and was worth about $8k. Shortly before payout a bunch of downvotes showed up and knocked the payout down to $5k. I was pissed! Not because they downvoted, but because they downvoted without commenting and telling me why they downvoted. I think they just wanted the reward reduced, which is not an action that should be condoned.
So here's my thoughts - downvotes only get applied if they are accompanied by a comment that is upvoted by someone other than the OP and the down voter. Boom!
Still thinking about this... so you deserve extra replies. Hope you don't mind.
WHO DO WE REPORT TO? WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
Yes, I do see that conundrum.
It could be abused. I'd like to see the flag come up as a choice of plagiarism, spam, abusive.
People could still false flag. So how do we deal with that? I think Dan's down voting flags if they are false flags is not a bad idea.
However, I am seeing a number of people being flagged simply for disagreement, or anger, or spite, or retaliation for being flagged. We've seen these things on reddit as well.
Yet there they do not also reduce monetary income. I believe it could be much worse here.
We have a pretty civil and intelligent group of people here now. It likely won't always be thus.
Yes, you're describing the dreaded bad whale attack. Zuckerberg powers up a few dozen whale accounts and goes to town destroying everyone's reputations... Steemit dies. Right now the defense is for the good whales to catch the bad whales before they do too much damage, but that is a not a good long term solution.
I think my suggestion of validating flags/downvotes by upvotes might be a good way forward.
Wrote a post about this, have a read and let me know what you think: https://steemit.com/steemit/@johnsmith/how-to-solve-the-downvote-conundrum-with-one-simple-trick-upvoting-downvotes
Perhaps. I don't think even on reddit they are MEH about it. Some people yes, but it can also be a very hostile environment.
Good point - beyond the actual impact of the downvote there is the impact on people's pride which can elicit a rather irrational response. One could ignore that - but hostile reactions do set and poison the tone on a platform.
So, yes, you might be right that downvotes are a bad idea even when their monetary impact is small.
If I saw down votes as solving something that couldn't be handled other ways I'd be all for it. Yet I decouple down votes from the reporting plagiarism, spam, abusive posts. Those things I consider as needing to be flagged or down voting.
I've been fortunate. I have not had too many down votes, and the few I did were on posts weeks after I wrote them. I can be devil's advocate and the opposite of many people I have spoken to here, but I do try to keep it civil. So do they. I love that.
Good post.
Down-voting needs to stay. The rule for Down-voting needs to be exactly the same as for up-voting (just in the negative). If you like a post, agree with it, or find the argument or post beneficial in some way then Up-Vote it. However it you dislike a post because the argument is flawed, fined the argument or post non-beneficial then you should be able to down-vote it.
If not then you have differing rules for why to up-vote to those of why to down-vote.
I do feel there needs to be a comment posted with every down-vote for some form of accountability.