HF21: downvotes when expressing unpopular opinions
Hey everyone, the recent HF21 announcement which also includes changes to downvotes got me thinking about the restriction content creators might feel when expressing unpopular opinions.
For those of you that are unaware, or need a reminder, the proposed changes to downvoting will include a 25% seperate pool from which users can tap to downvote without losing any ROI. Basically, and do correct me if I'm wrong, the first 25% of your downvotes will touch a different pool only meant for downvoting. As such, as long as your downvotes only touch the separate mana pool your voting power won’t be lowered and you won’t lose any income for downvoting content.
The biggest motivation is that people that spam self upvotes and botters alike could be flagged without repercussions. As long as the downvote button isn't abused that is. A great idea, though while I think many of us will actually downvote artificial content and self upvote abusers. Others will use it to settle disputes (flag wars) or just punish content that doesn’t align with their personal values.
Offence is often taken when not meant to be given
Content that doesn’t align with people’s values are more often than not what we call “controversial topics”. Topics as religion, politics, abortion, etc... can easily cause controversy if you’re not necessarily agreeing, or just questioning, what the majority says. Resulting in many people choosing to stay quiet.
As such, people choose not to create certain content out of fear of offending others. Content whose goal was never to address or insult anyone in particular. Possible quality content, well argued, open for debate, nicely written (post) or presented(live stream, video) content. Whose only goal was to make people think and start a discussion. never see the daylights out of fear of not only collecting downvotes but also putting all your future and present content at risk or even starting a witch hunt against the author.
It's that sort of fear that restricts many users of creating some more in depth content. This not only results in huge possible target audiences not taking interest in Steem as they feel that they will just be punished for voicing their opinion. But also causing the same content being recycled over and over again limiting the quality on the blockchain
A (heated) debate can be quality content as well
Further it's important to notice the difference between a debate and being offended. Someone disagreeing is not the same as someone insulting. More often than not an invitation to have a debate is taken personal. Escalating in topics that have little to nothing to do with the original content. While the primary function of debating has never been about being right, it’s about making us think and learning about matter in the hope to forge new ideas.
However, this misjudged provocation (which was never meant to provoke) is often a fuel to start downvoting comments and content alike. This can result in the same fear that restricts users from creating content about “controversial topics” and having them never starting the discussion in the first place. That while discussing a topic is actually and extend of the original content and can be at least as, if not more, valuable.
The 25% downvote pool in this story
My personal feeling is that the 25% downvote can be perceived as an invitation to daily downvote topics or users that the downvoter feels great adversity towards. I am following the initial idea and reasoning behind it. Though, I think that if 10% or even “only” 5% of the downvoters use it to punish content that never deserved to be punished in the first place, it will cause more harm than good in the form of people searching alternatives to Steem.
The alternative? Well that’s the hard part in this story, right? I think the 50/50 is actually not that bad. I really like the idea of searching for good content being more valuable than selling your votes. It’s a nice natural way of rewarding users that go through a whole pile of content. At least that is how I perceive it and I’ll gladly give it a shot once HF21 is pushed through. Whether it will be enough to stop bots and self upvotes or at least lessen them to a level where they are less problematic is really something we’ll only be able to tell once HF21 is life. But if it is, the separate downvote pool primary function will be punishing other users. As such it could have been an option to wait with the separate downvote pool to see what the results of the 50/50 measure will be.
Another thing that I can think of might be just making self upvotes past a certain percentage impossible. As at least 50% of the upvotes cast have to be cast at other accounts, in combination with the 50/50 rule that should cause that people still make a nice amount of Steem on their curation reward. Flawed indeed, as the barrier of creating multiple accounts and just voting back and forth between those accounts isn’t that high. Maybe since the curation rewards will be higher it could be combined with burning part of the curation reward if you upvoted a certain user x amount of times in y amount of time.
Anyway these ideas are just off the top of my head and while they are maybe not bulletproof I hope I gave you something to think about. If you have any other ideas I’ll gladly hear them out :)