RE: Negative Voting and Steem
Right on. Well said. Adding "features" such as a reputation system is actually adding censorship. I agree that they should be concentrating on creating front-ends to make curation more fun, and profitable to committed users, and encouraging the creation of tools and bots that really help, with really smart AI. Instead of trying to kill bots by ruining the experience for everyone to freely vote and post whatever content they choose and as much as they like, we need to embrace them and make them really useful.
This is 2016. People need to accept that AI is a tool, an extension of ourselves. Restricting the use just because someone, like Wang, is /successful/ is a form of censorship and a limitation of freedom of expression, and to me, a limitation of the freedom of thought, because to me, a bot is an extension of my own mind. It votes with the strategy I program it to vote with. It is me. And no one, under the original Steemit implementation, had the right to limit how and when I vote.
I think it even simpler, tbh. With the proper front-end, you could simply save a blacklist. There would be a market for blacklist, @cheetah would get upvotes to no end for providing curated lists of known spammers, malbots, plagiators, impersonators and trolls, and, depending on severity and heuristics, hide or block their posts automatically so they never take up one second of attention. Problem solved.
Who needs a reputation system if you have such an incentive to behave well?
Has your ability to vote been limited in any way?
Yes, because voting power decreases with votes cast, then I am always consciously thinking of whether or not I should vote on something based on my past history of voting. Think about that for a second. I am altering my behavior of trying to reward content and comments I like and think have value (such as your comments), because I thought something else I just read had value too? That's not right. I'm censoring my actions based on my previous actions, and making a decision to vote or not based not on the value offered by the post/comment, but simply based on my prior actions. That sucks.
I don't remember any time when voting wasn't restricted by consumable power. That would lead to horrible vote spamming abuse. In the early releases, vote power recharged by the day (instead of five days currently) and each vote used more of it compared to now.
Another limitation is the algorithm for weighing your vote based on age. What about short posts that take 1 second to read and you like it? You vote it up and it goes to the moon and you get a pittance. You have to apply a strategy to time your vote? That is just wrong.