RE: Opposing Perceptions, mismatched definitions, parity mismatch, voting, down voting, and "fairness"
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.
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.