RE: One Currency To Unite Them All
its a complicated issue, off the top of my head I do not have a solution for fixing the flaws of POB. But I believe it is important for everyone to admit that POB in its current design does not work so that we can fix it.
If people are afraid to admit this in fear of STEEM price going down in the short term, it could hurt Steem in the long term. We need to be brutally honest about the network's flaws so that we can discuss it and fix it.
One possible solution is removing POB from STEEM and keeping it only in SMTs with incredible flexibility baked into the protocol. If SMTs can try many different forms of POB, we might discover successful forms of it.
For example, people argue that having POB without downvotes does not work, and then they point out whaleshares. But it might not be that whaleshares is a failure due to downvotes, the project might have failed simply because too few people believed in it or it simply didn't offer anything Steem did not offer already.
So, SMTs can allow many projects to experiment with their own versions of POB, as long as we provide great flexibility in their POB features. And the POB designs that work best will shine through over time.
Good thoughts. I don't think a community policing the rest of the community is something that is going to be very attractive to the rest of the world. It's simply way too negative. People want to go to places that make them feel good, not bad. No matter how much "we" try to normalize the downvote experience it is still a negative one, even more so when money is involved. There is a reason Facebook doesn't have a dislike button.
I agree. I do not believe the downvote button is a good idea. That said, there is a legitimate reason people want it to exist. Facebook is centralized, at any time they can remove a person's content, but on a decentralized protocol like Steem there is absolutely no stopping people without something like a downvote button.
The issue with the downvote button is not that it exists, but that it can be used unfairly and unjustly. I also agree with you that it makes people feel unhappy and can deter people from continuing to use Steem. Primarily though, my concern is that downvotes are a matter of whim and are used for whatever one feels like using it for. This can cause it to create narrow-mindedness as one community of ideals can be stomped on by a bigger and wealther community.