Anonymous voting and honesty in the choosing
Since the last hardfork that made downvoting great again, there has obviously been a fair bit of retaliation going on targeting those that have downvoted for whatever reason they have chosen.
@acidyo posted today about some of his thoughts and @kevinwong commented on something that has been brought up before, anonymous voting.
This is something that I believe will be revisited many times to come and I feel will eventually happen, as will hiding the wallets due to various risks and concerns of safety - When Steem is riding at tens of dollars, some people living in or travelling to some countries are likely going to get targeted.
So, imagine a scenario where the amounts are shown, but who voted and at what level is masked. What I think would happen with anonymous voting (besides the early attempts to scam it) is that there will eventually be a more balanced approach to voting, and while it defuses the potential for retaliation by removing the target, it also takes away some of the negatives of upvoting.
For example, in time without people knowing who is who, the larger staked voters would be left alone to vote as they see fit without having to be concerned with public opinion nor get targeted by upvote beggars. This would also make the post itself the actual focus of the upvotes rather than the person, unless the person proves themselves worthy through their content - the same as on other platforms.
On top of this, the content will also be evenly targeted by those who are willing to downvote for overvalued content without having to worry about retaliation. In time, anonymity in voting could mean that a healthier content value discovery mechanism could be established with a greater focus on the content creators, rather than who has stake or not.
Part of the problem we have seen recently is when some content like an art post have been pushed up in value and then judged critically as overvalued based on who upvoted it. Even though those same content creators might never get another vote of that size, people find it unfair that someone gets lucky even once. Making the vote anonymous would mean that when those who come in to evaluate aren't going to be colored either way by who has previously voted it.
Taking out the "person" from the voting list means that like @kevinwong noted later in the comment chain, Steem becomes more content-centric, and this means that eventually those who attract votes will be those who are able to garner the attention of the staked community and have that community direct the flow of Steem to and away from the content as it sees fit, the way it was designed.
One of the drawbacks for staked members of course then is that the stake no longer becomes a near automatic attractor of attention, but this is likely a good thing for rel content producers as it means that stake would have to more evenly compete for attention in the content marketplace. Much of the stake wouldn't bother and would instead choose to earn from curation, again the way it is designed.
One of the positives of anonymous voting is that it would take away a lot of the comparison between stake and perhaps make smaller users feel more significant with their vote. This could better bring into alignment the idea that @nonameslefttouse has mentioned a fair bit over the last year or so, tipping for life. This could put more buy pressure on Steem because taking away the comparisons makes everyone feel that their vote has value and, buying Steem will be the gateway to that perpetual ability to vote and earn, no matter the amount.
From an interaction and engagement standpoint, adding anonymity of vote means that people will not necessarily know who has stake and who has not ad this means that people will have to better understand the preferences of their audience, no matter who they are. This makes targeting large stake much harder, but also frees up that same large stake to vote as they see fit without having to worry about who is watching. Of course, the checks and balances are still in place and over voted shit content can still be knocked down and with that anonymity of vote, the content itself will be held accountable.
There are many pros and a few cons to hiding the voting and stake, but I think that it makes more sense and what it will mean is that reputation of account will become an important metric that holds value. An account that has been able to build a reputation based on how that account acts in the community without having the stake influence the perspective makes it more useful as an indicator.
Perhaps one of the SMT applications will use a way to mask and disconnect names and stakes to see what kinds of changes to voting behavior and interaction take place. I do think that it is worth the experiment to find out as I reckon that the largest winners on the platform would be the content producers themselves as they are able to compete based on what they offer the community rather than who they know. Backdoor deals will be relatively obvious and will get downvoted consistently without reprisal possible and a whole new way to engage would be born on Steem.
Perhaps without anonymity, the wisdom of the crowd and proof-of-brain will better be able to balance the supply, demand and the rewards through the communities by giving people the freedom to choose more honestly without fearing the judgement they currently get in their choice.
What are your thoughts on anonymous voting, better or worse? Pros and cons?
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
I'm a big fan of putting control in the hands of the users. The way I see it; right now the user decides his level of public exposure when he's choosing his account name.
I've chosen to use my full name (although in fairness it's a pretty common combo).
Others use something completely obscure. You've picked a middle ground.
Others, like Aggy have a screen name, but publicly post their real name.
I'm sure many have multiple accounts, too.
So I could downvote one post in my own name, and another with my (non posting) mystery alt, which gives me the choice. If all votes and wallets were hidden, then I wouldn't have the option to do anything publicly = I don't have a choice.
There may be benefits to preventing a user from publicly voting, but if they wanted to they could comment. "I'll be up/down voting this post in the block after this comment", and tie their personal contribution/subtraction to their identity.
I'm sure a tool to automate that wouldn't be difficult to code.
Cost/benefit I just don't see the upside to anonymous voting tbh. That said, I'd be very interested to see how an anonymous SMT would work. The whole point is to experiment with ideas like this.
I don't think anonymous voting would be included on Steem, but if I mentioned it in an SMT alone, people wouldn't think that much about it, just push it out to "later". :)
There are pros and cons to it and one of the cons is that (if forced) anonymity takes away the attractive power of stake and the ability to influence the platform past the voting. Influence comes in many forms and like it or not, the having of stake is one factor.
I am interested in how behaviors might change as from as far as I can tell, if one was to compare the difference in behavior between the "known" and "anon" accounts when it comes to bad actors, I would say there is a clear bias toward the anon. Would masking stake make it more prevalent?
I agree security should come before showing off. I like the idea of girls stalking me cause I have a lot of money when STEEM goes to 10, however not if the girls are going to take advantage! Also could be dangerous! What if STEEM goes to 100? lol or like BTC even one day?
If it went like BTC I think Steemians would own the world and most of the galaxy considering the inflation--- but yeah, at 10, 20 -50 etc it would get a little interesting. The thing about having control of the keys is that there is no "bank" proxy to stop something like a kidnapping and torture to hand them over.
Another genius idea of kevin.
Guys, we're sinking faster by day.
This has been discussed in various ways well before I got here and probably before the chain passed its first block.
And probably because it's a bad idea it wasn't implemented?
I think ideals were the main reason. Transparency is a good trait to have - but there are also drawbacks to it.
Interesting post. I don't know if we'll ever have anonymous voting and as people in comments said, it goes against the transparency STEEM is known for.
I wonder if in the future this is going to be a benefit or a drawback for adoption.
There are many reasons to be anonymous - I am for anonymity - but everyone must decide for himself
Yes, there are plenty of reasons to be anonymous and many are here. THeir wallet is still available though. I am still undecided if that is a good thing long term or not.
Getting upvotes > getting downvotes > giving upvotes. When that order is fixed, I'll have a shred of hope again.
What order would you like? Is this a "Pick any two" thing? ;D
I sadly don't have enough Steem mental power these days to elaborate properly. My view of the answer is the order everyone should recognize as being most beneficial for the majority of Steemians struggling for table scraps/recognition/respect, while the same chosen few continue to eat well for posting XYZ, and prioritizing their SP for returning the votes/downvotes.
Hmm, well the front-ends can hide this but there are a variety of tools that can be used to watch what is happening. Personally, I quite like seeing my vote in the top 20 of something interesting.
Yep, it would require a side chain solution I guess. Perhaps it could be optional.
Interesting idea. I think though that if anonymous votes (on a blockchain level rather than just a front-end level) turns into a thing -- then all the efforts to prevent bid-bot / vote-circles will become substantially more difficult.
Any relatively savvy user that knows their way around a bit of Python or JS could pretty quickly figure out who up/down-voted their posts if the solution is implemented only on front-ends, and then retaliate / target if desired.
I'd be curious to see what would happen if only down-votes were made to be anonymous. That way "value-extraction abuse" could still be discovered -- and then smaller accounts would be able to cast DV's w/o fear of reprisal.
It would also be interesting to see if a threshhold could be applied for anonymity -- perhaps if you DV value is MORE than -1 STEEM, the DV account is now visible and potentially needs to be justified. Up to that -1 STEEM threshold, maybe you're able to cast a DV w/o revealing your identity.
tl;dr -- I don't think voting should be entirely anonymous, as I think it would only allow bad actors w/ bad intentions more difficult to identify and prevent. Interesting potential w/ making small DV's anonymous though.
It would have to be on the BC level, not the frontend. I don't think that it could happen on steem, which is why I mentioned a tribe or SMT could test it - perhaps for new signups.
This would be interesting too. The threshold would also be an interesting way to protect smaller users, but I wonder if it would end up in a stream of bots.
I like the idea you proposed of making only the downvotes anonymous. I'd like to see the results if it happened.
Your last thought might really tell us. In case it is used in a field project tribe, but it is extremely controversial.
Yep, it is controversial, which is why it should be thought about by many people. A tribe/SMT community is the most likely testing ground and perhaps only place it would ever be attempted.
Anonymous voting would directly result in evil methods of whales self-voting, like they have in the past.
History repeats itself.
History repeats itself.
👆 See.
Strong evidence :D
It is possible, but then it is also possible that with a lack of retaliation possible, there is a greater drive to regulate too. Many said that no one would DV after the last hardfork too.