RE: [proposal] A potential alternative to Voting Power, Voting Tokens?
Interesting idea. I think the main reason I don't like it is it changes the psychological nature of the interaction. The breakthrough of Steemit is that no one is "paying" anything for a vote and yet authors are still getting paid. Hiding the voting power is actually a big psychological benefit, IMO. If the UI made it clear a voter was "paying" in tokens to show their gratitude for a post, it would change the interaction.
I know the voting is complicated, but change is always something people don't like. There will be much change as this goes from beta to stable. I think things can be figured out over time for those who really care. For most, a simple vote is a good way to go. The slider bar is something I really like, but I also think it should be turned off by default and the steemit.com site should store some settings in local storage for the browser for users to customize their settings and turn things like that on in an advanced mode. Just my thoughts.
The only change I see happening is that people might actually understand it, so that might impact some peoples behavior. Otherwise in all instances, whether it's live, 0.14.0, or this - you're "paying" some sort of value to cast your vote. I might even argue against the word "paying", I didn't even use it in my post, because you use tokens.
I could also make the argument that the psychological barrier towards payments only applies if the user is actually paying with something that has a tangible value. Have you ever felt the same psychological stress spending gold in a video game? Likely not, but actually going to the store and giving them your credit card to buy the game has a much different impact.
Oh cmon, you can't say change is always something people don't like :)
When things suck, people want change, and are happy to embrace it. I've built enough user facing systems in my life to know that change can suck, but in the end it's generally a great thing as long as it's executed properly.
I completely agree with you there - does it sound like my post is offering something more complicated? If so, I may have just written something terribly. If simple is a good way to go, why should we use a system that says you have a "voting power" percentage that decreases by a set percentage based off 5 votes per day factored off your voting weight is how often you can vote? How is that simple? A simple decreasing number every time you click the button is simple... what we have now is far from it. The interaction is simple, but the understanding of what they're doing is not.
From what I can tell, all 0.14.0 does for voting is tweak a system that's fundamentally confusing and obscure, in an effort to combat bots and whales, at the expense of the general user. That's the reason I'm looking far beyond the tweaked numbers and actually at the presentation and understandability of the system as a whole. If 0.14.0 goes through as is - I fully expect a lot of confusion and general unhappiness regarding voting - it won't help steemit in the long run, and within 6 months they'll realize it and we'll see a change to something more simple.
It's frustrating to see some of these changes happening with very little consideration towards the normal users. I'm also pretty surprised you don't see this as a problem (in it's current implementation) - do you think you have a good grasp on how this change will impact your voting? I do, but I've already spent an entire day considering the ramifications on these changes - something most people won't do.
There are degrees of loss aversion people feel on a spectrum. I've seen studies that show hard currency is worse, then debit cards because people think about the hard money in their bank, then credit cards, then the "wave over this spot to pay", then game tokens (war craft gold, etc), etc, etc. I see it as all on the spectrum. Even though people are "paying" (I use that word because you had something, then you don't have it anymore because you spend it to get an outcome you want) in voting percentage, it's not shown in the interface currently. Most users (you and I are power users, I'm thinking about all my friends and family I'd like to get to join up) know nothing about voting percentages or how they change over time. They probably don't care either.
Very true, thanks for calling me on it. I wrote my reply in a rush and didn't express myself very well. I was meaning more along the lines of the generalization cliche of "people fear change."
That was my impression, but I probably didn't spend enough time reading it through carefully. Again though, I'm thinking in terms of the psychological effect of spending (even if you see the tokens as non-valuable things, if they lead to curation rewards, they become valuable things).
That made me think we'd lose some of the "no microtipping" part of Steemit we enjoy right now.
Will the proposed Steemit changes include UI changes for normal users? If they don't, then I'm less concerned about them than I would be about UI changes that would add complexity for normal users. I do think simplicity is important and I think you and I are in agreement about that. It may be that a token based system makes a lot more sense than a percentage (even if, under the hood, it's still actually a percentage). How it's displayed matters, but I prefer keeping complexity away from people who may not really care about it (i.e. the "normal users").