So I was talking to my good friend @jrcornel today and we had a little discussion about downvotes. It started in response to @themarkymark's Proposal to return the 12 hour voting window gate.

I'm not sure why we got rid of the window and I don't really care. Downvoting has never been my thing. I'm not a fan of negative reinforcement and I've never seen content worthy of a downvote. To be fair I'm also not looking for counterproductive posts. I rarely ever even look at trending. Since downvotes became free under the EIP I haven't downvoted a single post (until today).

I just went down my list and started downvoting everyone in my feed just to test it out. You see, @jrcornel told me something that I didn't believe: that when you run out of downvote power it just starts using your upvote power, meaning we have more than enough power to downvote everything on the platform to zero; effectively every account has a 125% downvote pool.

It was my understanding that the downvote pool was made completely separate and 25% as large as the upvote pool. I had no idea how it even worked. Were downvotes 25% as strong as upvotes, or did downvotes simply consume 4 times as much voting power? After running these tests I got the easy answers I was looking for.

Logistics

So every downvote you cast pretty much takes away 8% of your downvote pool. This gives you 12.5 free downvotes. Once your run out of power it starts taking away your upvote power just like it used to before the EIP. It's important to note that those first 12.5 downvotes are full power, while that power starts to taper off when you dip into your upvote pool.

EIP

I've stated this multiple times, but I was vehemently against the EIP. Everything about it was potentially a bad idea, and to do it all at once was EXTREMELY risky. So far, it's turned out much better than I thought it would.

Truth be told, I thought we'd be seeing people selling their downvotes by now. They are just a free resource sitting around being wasted by many (myself included). Of course selling downvotes is a bit different than selling upvotes. If you sell your downvote you might make enemies with the person that gets downvoted, and then you'd make yourself a target for free downvotes.

The system is backwards.

The main reason I'm against the EIP is that it caters to the idea that Hive is only a blogging/social-media platform. We are manipulating our consensus backend to cater to the blogging frontends, which is completely backwards. How the frontends decide to interpret the blockchain (UX) should have nothing to do with our consensus.

We changed curation to 50/50 and added the downvote pool to "fix" the trending tab. Here's a novel concept: how about we fix the trending tabs of the frontends without manipulating our backend? No one is forcing high-payout posts to appear at the top of trending, yet the developers in charge of this network act like that is an inescapable fact that the entire network must be built around. It's a ludicrous mindset.

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Imagine a prominent member of the Bitcoin community coming forward telling everyone Bitcoin Core code needs to be changed to accommodate the block explorers.

They would get laughed out of the room.
You don't change the backend to accommodate the frontend.

Isn't that obvious?

Yet that is pretty much exactly what happened with the EIP;
Except everyone took it seriously.

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Eventually the entire system we've built here with the EIP is going to get gamed into the dirt. Downvotes will be sold to the highest bidder. Curation will get gamed with bots that cast upvotes on posts that have a high probability of getting upvoted (already happening). The convergent curve has no affect on the high-stakes accounts that we actually have to worry about. Money from the Proposal system will flow into the hands of people that aren't doing enough work to justify it.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. Regardless, I think Hive is still lightyears ahead of the "competition" so I'm not really worried about any of it. We'll figure it out, even if it takes a while. On top of that, every year that goes by the network gets more decentralized in distribution, so the system is far from totally broken. Baby-steps.

I guess the main point of this post was simply to point out how complicated this can all be. I've been here for 2 and a half years and I'm learning programming and I still didn't even realize the mechanics of the downvote pool because I didn't care to. I think it's stuff like this that really highlights now the unchanging nature of Bitcoin as the anchor of crypto is truly a feature and not a bug. Sometimes change is bad. If it's not broke don't fix it.

Conclusion

I've still never cast a single downvote on Hive. I did that all the testing on Steem because they still operate under the same rules. Not to worry, I reversed all the downvotes with upvotes immediately after logging the results.

Should we side with @themarkymark and stop people from upvoting during the last 12 hours before payout? Why not? Like I said, it's not my thing. It's certainly not going to interfere with anything I do here. If he wants to be the one to run a blacklist and return rewards back to the pool so be it. To each his own; every strong community is bound to have a full-spectrum of active players.

Is having a 125% downvote pool bad? No idea. In my opinion it's turned out so far to be the best thing about the EIP next to the Proposal system. Time will tell if these systems end up becoming corrupted or not.

It becomes clear to me that at some point I'm going to have to put up or shut up. If I keep making claims that the system is broken I'll eventually have to do something about it rather than point out the "obvious". No worries, more than enough room for White-Hats around here.