Steemit Proposal: Hardcap any reputation reduction from a single individual to -5
The proposal is as follows: One individual should not be able to reduce the reputation of another individual by more than 5 points in total in any time period.
New users are extremely vulnerable not only to whales, but even to someone with a few thousand SP that goes over the history of a person to downvote/flag multiple of their comments and posts.
A hardcap of 5 (or less) would require the downvoting from multiple individuals in order to "destroy" their reputation. It would also disallow whales to destroy an account's reputation in one go.
It's not a bad suggestion as I share your concern that rogue individuals could unjustly censor less influential people. But I can see the other side as well. The purpose of voting and flagging is for those who are most invested in the future of the platform and currency to have the most influence to guide who is recognised and who is censored, hopefully for the good of steem. I do agree that the system is open to abuse but at the end of the day, every culture rises and falls on the morals or lack thereof of its participants. I'm more inclined to trust in the inherent incentives of the free market system than to create more rules. Thoughts?
One can still flag and have influence on content. Destroying the reputation of a single individual would just require more than 1 person to do it. If say you want to lower a rep "25" to zero, you'd have to have 5 flags (5 curators x -5 max rep cut each). That's the rationale.
Agreed. If we rally believe that the community will guide steem, it can't be done via pseudo dictatorship.
I actually think the curation power of downvotes should be capped in general.
interesting sentiments here, I am however reserved to the idea of disallowing downvotes, what if a bad actor comes and starts posting literally post after post of bad...
Downvotes are not affected at all. Neither is their concealing effect. Not even the reputation reduction effect is affected - it is simply limited up to 5 points per individual doing the flagging so as to prevent the "thor-of-hammer" effect where a new entrant can be destroyed by 10 flags of a small player or 1 flag by a large player.
"Individual" is a poorly defined concept. I have thousands of accounts and one can buy accounts with high rep, etc.
A better approach I think is capping the reputation change allowable per day. Spammers and abusers would get to bother us for a limited time period (individual posts could still be voted down and hidden) but that is a reasonable tradeoff against insta-wrecking rep.
I'd be ok with a definition change to "from a single account".
I've seen a case where a user with rep around 60, saw a bad comment in their thread from someone with rep around 25, and then went over their history and started flagging everything there. So the 25 went down to something like 1 or 2. After a few more downvotes it would be negative. And that's not even a whale.
So that made me realize you can have small-to-medium accounts (let's say 1k - 2k sp) that can be rogue or act maliciously to destroy new user rep, just because they can. A hardcap of 5 points influence (to the effect that one account can have to another) seems like a reasonable solution.