What this commit implements can be emulated exactly with a bot that follows every action of the user and downvote all the posts he upvotes and upvotes all the posts he downvotes. The only difference is that the bot version is more spammy and only available to advanced users including whales and bot spammers. Negating voting also has a few great upsides:
- it allows to vote against a witness instead of upvoting every other competing witness. That's a powerful and explicit message to send to all the free-rider witnesses who are content to take the ~60k USD / month reward but don't even bother making weekly reports. Instead of "not seeing their support grow" (which they won't even notice), lazy witnesses will see their power be eaten up a little bit more every week and that they should notice, in particular if the GUI allows to display separately negative voting on witnesses.
- It allows minnows to overthrow the power of an evil whale. If enough minnows sacrifice their voting power, a whale can become powerless. That would make good food for thoughts for whales who think they are almighty and abuse their power.
What I hear you saying is that Dan wants more power over witnesses...
The second upside you mention seems a little far fetched. The only people who really think in terms of "evil whales" are other whales. Specifically in this case its a whale who wants to consolidate his power over other whales.
Come on, this isn't Bitcointalk, let's not start spreading FUD.
We all know full well that the only reason current witnesses are witnesses is because they have the support of @dan, @ned, @dantheman, and @steemit. Dan already has entire control on who is witness. At the moment it's the community that doesn't have much say on who gets to be a witness. If we really think one witness is a free rider who really doesn't deserve the (huge) payout he is getting and we all want to get him out, it's much easier to coordinate downvotes against him (actually there is nothing to coordinate) than coordinate upvotes on 19 other witnesses including a new one from the backup list so that he would fall to #20 position and lose his slot.
I'm surprised to hear that said from a member of #steemitabuse when it's a fact that we have users every day who come to whine about power abuse. Granted most of these users are actual spammers who are just being salty, but I have seen some new but somewhat larger users acting like small tyrants in a thread and downvoting on sight people with different opinions. That kind of troll could use some 1-week correction of attitude when the whole thread turns against him and locks him out. This kind of situation will become more and more frequent: just look at the crazy downvote trolling on Reddit.
Like you said, most of those complaints about abuse of power come from people upset that they can't get away with some form of abuse... The bulk of the complaints about whales that I hear are that they vote on certain posts, while other worthy posts don't get anything. Hard to see an organized vote-cancelling-bloc forming based on that.
Handling a pretty typical user that goes on a rampage is an interesting use for a function like this... I hadn't considered that when you said "evil whales"