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RE: Simple Redesign on Downvote for More Positivity
So you're in support but it's not enough? That's good. Step by step. In fact, clear and small steps should be the way of any change. It was one of the issue getting KF 17/18 through, waaaay too much in there.
A downvoting system that drains more voting power than an equal upvote won't solve abusive downvoting as much as it will enable abuse and make countering it SIMPLY for visibility that much harder.
Another problem is that yes, a downvote needs to be weighed in respect to it's negative bias impact on users, so that griefing and abusive downvotes are not motivated with the current equal worth system. One negative action can easily negate numerous positive actions, and as such minimizing the effect of negative actions and keeping it at a ratio that balances these effects.
The reason I am for a changing downvoting is because this scenario has repeated a few times now:
Bad whale actor ensues flagwar.
There's no way to counter a bad whale. The problem is that there are two different things, flagging is what a downvote is, yet flagging isn't just the renaming of downvote because the reason it was renamed was to be perceived more severely than simply a Downvote, but that only led to the confusion which amended the list of reasons one should flag with "disagreement over rewards". Flagging is all about abusive behavior and how to deal with that. Flagging therefore should get it's own system which doesn't differentiate between actors vests and their behavior, if a whale wants to spam, or plagiarize, or troll, or spew hate and spread malice, they should be dealt with by the community, but specifically the individuals, and not be untouchable because of their bulletproof vests, there's not anywhere written in stone that a downvote is equal to an upvote, or that without that there's no incentive to hold SP, it's not written anywhere that holding SP is dependent on a equal weight voting system or one without a dedicated flag. It's not written anywhere that policing the community should not be incentivized and those that endeavor to write the wrongs of the bad whales should waste voting power and fight a losing battle, because in the end the negative impact couldn't be mitigated ever by an equal weight system.
A simpler way is not always the answer, sometimes we need to observe the complexity of the problem and simplify it's solution sufficiently instead of making small steps/simple solutions, chasing our tails..
We have a system of reputation that seemingly does nothing more than effect visibility above and below a threshold. We have no way to deal with spam, even at 40 megabites a day, spam still can happen and it needs witness support to exclude an account from spamming. So far spamming is not a problem, it can become a problem as a person can register numerous accounts and overload the system with data by simply pasting images in a comment box! Correct me if I'm wrong, but once you upload an image there's no deleting it, even if you discard/cancel the comment or post you uploaded, the link seems to disappear into redundancy but that's not to say it doesn't work, because apart from not being able to browse all these different images directly, the data is still there and accessible with the link but the limits that are in place to stop spam can still be abused and I think would be abused no matter what they were in frequency.
Besides spam there's the problem of dropping visibility and popularity for these bad apples leading to other exploitative behavior like creating a spam post and filling it with enough comments that it doesn't peek anyone's interest, and under the cloak of a nuked account, they can vote on that account's comments, creating a progressively deteriorating situation in the worst case they can spam numerous comments, upvote them and wasting people's voting power, time and effort as well,trying to counter them, and they can still extract wealth at the same time.
I think that the flagging problems and our inability to police effectively will continue to persist, I don't see a simple solution creating much good in such a complex problem, but you never know. I do think that that by creating a meaningful reputation system which goes up with upvotes but only goes down with flags while downvotes still weigh on the payout yet drain 10x the voting power (shaking fist at proposed/upcoming stoopid change over 10x increase in voting power used for each vote!) of an equal downvote is a viable solution. If we give all the users the same tools at flagging, not one more powerful than another, but simply lock these tools behind high reputation, vests won't have the ultimate say on the platform, and they shouldn't as this is SOCIAL MEDIUM first, and crypto currency second. They can also then tackle spam, first by effecting the reputation of the author much more readily but also because the limit for creating content doesn't exist now, but it's equally not written in stone that everyone should be able to produce content on this social medium, yeah I know, call me Hitler but reaching Zero reputation should lock the person's account from posting, and a reputation under 30-40 should equally be locked from curating, or show me the stone! If we lock curation we can do away with alts and bots flagging without any content, or downvoting without any skin in the game. Yeah, I'm in support but it's not enough.
Your position doesn't appear to be coherent. You say it will actually enable more abuse
But then conclude that you're in support of it
Which is it?
The original intention of Steem is not actually against abuse as such you may be surprised to hear (I certainly was). From the whitepaper:
I suppose what this says is that people will try whatever can get away with, and that's fine as the coin should still be active, and thus potentially valuable. The problem is that this doesn't help us much with the social network.
I understand what you're saying about flagging being actual flagging, not downvoting. But this is simply not the case as it stands. If you advocate making flagging into a separate thing (I sounds like you do) I plain disagree. For me, behaviour is in the eyes of the beholder. We should support differences of opinion with tools but we already have that. I think improvement is all that's needed, not another system.
Let's see what happens with linear voting and then discuss the effect of so-called "bad" whale using their stake. It might be enough, especially coupled with what @clayop is suggesting here.
On rep, yes it should mean something on the blockchain. As has been pointed out plenty, this is a rather large oversight so far. But going as far as your "Hilter" solution, I'd oppose that.