There's also a misconception that there is a direct correlation between stake and rewards. If I have X stake, I have direct control over Y author or curation rewards. This thinking completely discounts the other sovereign actors and their opinion of those rewards or how they were obtained. There are a lot of differing opinions about behavior, and it's the job of every author or curator to determine what behavior maximizes return. If you entrench yourself into a certain behavior with the thinking, "it's my stake, I can do whatever I want", while technically true, it is not a reward maximization strategy. It is not the job of any single person to dictate what is acceptable behavior, because values differ. Those values should be expressed with upvotes and downvotes.
Retaliation is the thing that needs to be discouraged. People who make open threats and practice retaliation(especially large stakeholders against smaller ones) need to feel the full force of the community.
I see the pool like a wallet shared among many people. All of those with access can make layaway purchases, but all the others are able to challenge what and how much of it is bought over the next 7 days.
Yep, it is a community responsibility.
It's a co-ordination problem. Anyone who sticks their neck out first will get their account destroyed. Look at how the biggest asshole on Steem has one young fellow on auto-downvote, which means that his account will never earn a dime.
There already are tools to address this. Anyone can delegate to @curangel and anonymously suggest downvotes on anything they want using the @curangel interface. Another method is to use anonymous curation accounts that earn by auto-curating and grow stronger that way and auto-downvote the big circle jerkers and other assholes.
Some abusive downvoters do not post so they cannot be touched by downvotes, which means that healing accounts will be needed to counter the abusive downvotes.
There are several assholes here, I will have to look into it later.
The delegation leaves an attack vector, even if anonymous downvoting as we have seen.
It's true that the assholes could go after the delegators, which is why joining both the upvoting and downvoting trails from separate accounts might be the best policy. However, to my knowledge, this hasn't happened yet. The fellow I'm talking about downvoted the asshole in question using his main account.
@curangel has grown by several tens of thousands of SP and is now slightly below 700k.
Seems to be happening pretty heavily considering I DV directly and haven't DV'd any of these accounts.
You mean those who delegate to @curangel get downvoted pretty heavily by the assholes?
I got a massive retaliatory downvote once from the professor because I had been directly downvoting his posts dozens of times. But that was the only time. I got several retaliatory downvotes from the unstable surfer boy but also upvotes. My delegating to @curangel has resulted in no retaliatory downvotes of any kind. @curangel gets all the flak as is by design. I haven't downvoted the biggest asshole directly or indirectly. First of all, it would've be redundant after his announcement. Secondly, he could've wrecked my account, too. The young fellow stupidly went after the biggest asshole after I told him that downvoting wasn't that dangerous - he wouldn't do it at all at first. Now his earning capacity is wrecked for good. Indirect solutions are a must.
I have had about 20 100% from both accounts
Your rewards are so large as for you to be able to easily absorb downvotes like that in a stride. The young fellow is contemplating leaving Steem and publishing his content elsewhere. I've stopped giving advice to people here except on a general level. You can't know or control what other ideas they might have that could lead them to botch the execution.