The purpose of the voting process is to determine how much should be paid out for a post. We want to reward people who contribute to the network appropriately, within the limits that the scarcity of Steem allow.

How Much Is This Post Worth?

Options: Good. Bad.

One of the main reasons we argue over payouts is because the system isn't actually working to achieve the purpose described above. Even ignoring the connotations of the flag symbol ("your post is abusive"), instead of feeding the system with information on what we feel a post should be paid, we can only say "I think this post is worth more" and "I think this post is worth less". There are big problems with this. Worth more than what? The voter may mean more than the amount at the time of the vote. If the payout approaches a certain high or low amount, the vote may no longer accurately reflect what the voter wants.

In practice it seems like an up vote and down vote mostly say, and are interpreted as "This post is good" and "This post is bad" or as above "This post is abusive". Yet those don't even answer the question which the vote is asking, and very frequently they are also not what the voter had in mind. Sometimes the amounts that are paid out may not reflect the intentions of any of the voters.

This I feel is a major source of bad feelings. Sometimes posts from lucky users are rising to the top and whales rightly or wrongly feel the need to reign them in. This is why I have in the past suggested "smart votes". I don't know if there is a technical reason why this wouldn't be feasible, but in principle I think we do need to be moving towards a voting system which better reflects what the voters actually intend from their votes.

Another Way: Median As Threshold

Here's another way of doing votes. Internally have every vote include a payout recommendation. Websites which want to continue using upvotes and downvotes for new users can set defaults like $1,000,000 for upvotes and $0 for downvotes. For larger stakeholders and curators, they will choose a value which they think is fair. Then for payout calculations, determine the amount as normal, but take the median value from all votes (again by stake) and the payout is not allowed to exceed that.