RE: Proposal: Change Up and Downvotes to bids
This strikes me as an even more clunky Rube Goldberg machine than what we already got.
At least with upvotes/downvotes, it only asks a user to consider if they liked or disliked something. A bidding model, in theory, might solve some of the problems he mentions. But now everyone has to make up a number for what dollar value they believe something is worth, a lot more work and cognitive load. And if you really liked something, it would just mean you put a very high bid, so that you don't risk yours becoming a future "downvote" should others vote it higher than you originally did as an early curator.
In any case, for something to actually be a bidding system, it has to be that the curator actually makes a transfer themselves. And don't allocate from a rewardspool. Perhaps an idea for how to let multiple people bid for a sponsor role in a community?
My solutions is 1. that we just remove the inflation-based rewards pool from STEEM completely after SMTs are here. 2. That we focus on non-inflation-based ways to run a successful platform economy in which we make use of the fast and fee-less SBD and the removal of middlemen to allow more efficient, fairer, and better connections between advertisers, sponsors, promoters and other clients and the content creators. If creators who get good amounts of views are able to monetize their work well thanks to Steem without needing new tokens to be printed, then the whole worry of downvotes goes away anyways.
Even if we go for an SMT based system, there will always be this fight about up and down-votes and how much SMT something is going to be worth. It is not going to solve this problem, but shift the problem away to a different "currency".
I do agree that the base concept of it has a higher cognitive load though, but, as I described in an above comment I believe that a lot of it can be solved on the UI level.
You could have a slider similar to the voting power slider which might be centered around the current value and give some indications of the median value of this particular user or community. I do think that most of these complexities can be easily adjusted on the frontend.
Reddit works fine with up and downvotes because actually people don't see who casted this vote and no money only visibility is involved. This makes their system inherently simpler. Imagine how toxic reddit could be if they actually displayed who up and downvoted your content, imagine how many toxic DMs you would get. That's why I think, even for an SMT, the concept of only "up or down" is not helpful.
Thus, my concept would remove the concept of down or up-votes from the system, yes, of course, someone can just put a ridiculous value. But if he doesn't, his vote will never turn to a "downvote" because this concept doesn't exist. If I vote 5$ on a 50$ post, maybe I am shifting the average a bit down, but at the same time I am guaranteeing the author a minimum value. If I don't vote 5$ on his post, and a whale votes with 0$, he might get 0$, but if enough people assess it with 5$, this will be much more difficult for this whale to counter. Thus, I am helping the author to guarantee this minimum.
I personally think that would vastly improve Reddit. I might even have a look at it then, because it would become a less toxic echo chamber overall.
It is an echo chamber that's right, but it would definitely cause much more toxicity.
I think you misapprehend carrots and sticks. There are toxic snakes. Because of this people avoid pissing them off. This decreases the toxic behaviour snakes have to endure.
On Reddit, enabling folks to suffer the consequences of their toxic behaviours would reduce the toxicity of their behaviours.
There are downvotes on reddit, but you can't see who upvoted or downvoted it.
Just... No. Unless you just propose that Steem is no longer availed a voting mechanism at all, and all of the functionality of voting is completely removed from Steem itself and becomes solely the province of SMTs. That is an enormous sea change for Steem that completely alters what it is and everything about it, which requires an equal amount of detailed consideration.
Yes, besides it removing one of the biggest incentives of holding Steem power right now, we would need a strong shift to a RC based system before doing so.