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RE: Planning for long-term success of Steemit: Identifying areas of improvement
Good writeup and excellent points. Thanks for risking the thousand dollar downvote for us all!
Pushing the complexity into the background is definitely the most important thing to help gain more supporters, normal users don't read whitepapers just to surf a board...
I think point 4, adding a decent embedded HTML editor, would have the biggest positive effect. WYSIWYG editing is everywhere, there is no reason to make people learn markdown language. There has got to be some cut and paste code to add that. Maybe a bounty should be posted for that feature.
Thank you. Your comment made me realize a very interesting dimension of the voting dynamics. Although I'm new here and I do not understand the "risk" of a "thousand dollar downvote" - perhaps because I have nothing to lose (?) by sharing my honest opinion, I suspect what you are saying is that I could have lost money if my opinion was not "liked" / upvoted... If this is so, then the design may need some kind of tweaking in the direction where bad content is downvoted differently from an opinion that is simply not accepted by most.
If people are afraid to say their opinion because they might lose money, then that creates a group-think effect and further confirmation bias inside the group dynamic. Some times the "contrarian" might be the right one, even when most people don't want to see it. Historically people have been ...crucified or killed for their contrarian beliefs after upsetting the status quo. So we need some type of mechanism that ensures that all opinions can be presented in a way that does not imply financial harm to those who have different opinions (but are not bad-quality posters). This is perhaps worthy of a thread of its own - or it could have been discussed already, I don't really know - I just came onboard... so.... Out of the top of my head it seems that upvoting and downvoting could have qualitative points for "quality" and "opinion". One may have a high-quality content post that is thought provoking but arrives at a conclusion that is not shared by others. So at that point a downvote for this would be equated with a downvote for a "spam" message - which would be unfair. I haven't figured this through though - it definitely needs more thought and brainstorming to see how the system can be improved to "tolerate" less popular opinions.
Rewards are a net of stake weighted up votes and down votes. Once rewards have been distributed by the blockchain (beginning July 4th and approximately ~24 hrs after a post) they cannot be taken away. Even if you had been down voted to oblivion (which I am glad you were not because this post is high value user feedback) you could not lose any thing you own on the blockchain because rewards aren't distributed until later and they're not owned until then. There have been very few cases of down votes, however, and thankfully we are so far seeing a very positive level of engagement regardless of perspective.