A Proposal to All Steemians: We Have a Way To Control Trending Instead of the Whales

I recently heard about downvotecontrol.com and I'm sold. I'm not affiliated in any manner to the site or it's creator.

Until now, I didn't give a lot of thought about automated downvoting, and I assumed that automated downvoting was likely problematic because it wasn't fair to legitimate posts that get accidentally targeted.

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However, the problem with Steem inequality is that every system has inherent bias built-in. If you're following a downvote trail, you're now giving an individual a very large hammer to use as they please. If internal centralization of power wasn't bad enough, Whales (those holding large amounts of Steem) represent centralization of power originating from the real world that centralizes where Steem inflation (via the reward pool) goes, and in turn allows the centralized fiat economy to control a platform that is meant to combat centralization.

While the Steem blockchain is decentralized to some degree, and it's also democratically represented via witnesses and witness votes, the wealth of the Steem currency is re-distributed through steady inflation, and that inflation goes in large part to reward posts. The higher the average reward on trending, the harder it is for minnows and dolphins to even earn anything on the platform without paying the whales to upvote their post instead of the whales upvoting their friends or themselves. Either way, whether the whales upvote themselves and their friends or sell their upvote, the bottom 99.9% lose and the whales maintain their store of wealth by absorbing most of the inflation.

So what is the solution? How does Steem combat this platform killing behavior? And for those who doubt that this is platform killing behavior, Steem is in part a social media platform, and this centralization of inflation distribution is anti-social, which is what Steem is supposed to combat and not promote.

A glass ceiling that is enforced on an individual basis is a good solution to this behavior (in my opinion). I feel 50.00 is a good ceiling to set where I downvote a post, but someone else might disagree with me and think 10.00 is the highest a post should be worth on trending, and there might be someone who thinks 1000.00 is a good glass ceiling. I'm not writing this post to tell others what that ceiling should be, but rather to propose to others that they have the option to independently set a ceiling on the value of posts, and collectively the community can find true fair value.

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Some points to ponder:

• Less reward pool going to the bottom 99.9% of Steemians means less motivation to use Steem by the bottom 99.9%
• Less people using Steem as a social media platform means less people on the platform reading other posts, which means less eyeballs for advertisers
• Good posts that get say, 400.00 worth of Reward, aren't getting downvoted into the ground because people don't like the post, but because enough people believe no post can possibly add that much value to Steem that the long term payout to everyone is greater than the short term hit everyone takes when a single poster gets to eat everyone else's lunch.
• This works to the benefit of advertisers, who would find Steem more attractive because it's cheaper to hit the top of trending, which effectively lowers their CPM.
• Large whales are more likely to distribute their vote more broadly across a larger pool of posts, instead of giving massive upvotes to just a handful of posts each day. Doing so does not decrease their curation reward. (this behavior doesn't go unnoticed, and I know a lot of people over the years who have ditched Steem altogether because they believed there is no way to combat Whale circle-jerks)

The practice of downvoting any post that has a reward above a set dollar amount is not 100% bulletproof, nothing is.

• A large whale who is also an a-hole (we all know a few whales on Steem who have personality disorders, wink nudge) might decide they're going to downvote every post that gets more than 0.10 reward, and distribute their downvote across thousands of posts. Steem is an open platform and a whale would be free to do this, but such abuses are self-defeating to a Steem whale, and they risk beaching themselves (so to speak) by doing something so stupid. However, the whales are already doing this if and when they decide to upvote themselves or their friends with large upvotes, or if they sell their upvote.

There are likely other pros and cons that I have not thought of, but unless the bottom 99.9% of Steem can collectively agree to a strategy that works for everyone according to their own standards, and also benefits everyone collectively, then the social media side of Steem is already dead and I'm wasting my time. You don't need a crystal ball to predict such an outcome for Steem. I'm not saying the abuse of whales controlling the trending page will kill Steem, I'm saying I believe (with good reason) that only the DApp side of Steem will have any value to outside investment if the community as a whole continues to sit back and disagree to agree on effective ways to maintain decentralization.

If you don't want to share this post but you agree with the proposal, write your own post and claim the idea as your own, I really don't care. This proposal succeeding is more important to me than any kind of recognition or credit, plus I benefit financially (as would you) if the majority of Steemians exercise their newly given rights to down-vote - in a strategic and powerful way. And, like any kind of price discovery, we could collectively decide (on an individual basis) what the glass ceiling for trending posts is through free market mechanisms that Steem advocates by its mere existence.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this and consider the proposal. This is not a proposal to change Steem, but rather to utilize the tools available on Steem to benefit us all.

I don't care if you resteem this post or quote it, or even outright steal it verbatim and take credit - it would mean a lot to me if people at least spread this proposal in some manner (or come up with an even better solution of their own), because we need a solid long-term solution to a self-defeating long-term problem, especially now that we have a very useful tool at our disposal - it's our responsibility to use that tool effectively if we want Steem to succeed on the social media side of things, and grow to become the thing we all believe it can become.

I believe that nothing I've proposed here in this post is detrimental to anyone who holds steem. I highly doubt Steem developers or Witnesses would be comfortable backing a hard ceiling on post value, so it's up to us, The Community, to take the torch that they've handed to us and use it effectively to benefit everyone using Steem. Everyone.

Cheers and Best Wishes.
@briggsy