I'm not a fan of the moderator idea, because its still centralizing control.
In my view, the non-linear rewards curve was a good move for combating spam self-voting without causing aggressive changes. In fact, I'd trade making the threshold even higher for removing the new downvote mana bar.
I believe people need to choose between upvoting and downvoting. If taking a financial loss is worth it to the person to reduce the other guy's rewards, okay then, they just reduced their own network share for that decision.
Frankly, I can understand why people feel there is a need to have the flagging system. But it is an emotionally charged action that hurts the network by making Steem a hostile environment. I'd make downvotes cost triple an upvote on a shared mana bar so that it would be a costly decision made only out of necessity.
If people had to give up 3 upvotes to downvote 1 thing, they might think carefully about just how much they disliked it.
I like the ideas, but I think having it cost the same as an upvote was sufficient. Having more downvotes than upvotes is beyond silly to me. Most social sites are trying to get rid of negativity, we are fostering it. My vote would be to change the curator/author split to 75/25 (in favor of curator), lower the linear thresh-hold slightly (so that we don't discourage voting small users), and make downvotes cost the same as an upvote (if not more like you suggested).
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I definitely agree with 75% to curators and 25% to authors. It allows for professional curators to theoretically earn enough to make a job out of it and if we had many career curators we might stop seeing so many bot systems and the authors would ultimately earn more.
A clear problem we are seeing is that people do not want to spend the time curating. Even the downvoting crowd goes off about how important Proof of Brain is and then thoughtlessly uses a downvote automation tool...
If we're going to do a "skin in the game" stake-weighted voting system let's do it right and make the risk/reward worth the investment.
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Yep, agreed completely. Plus changing the curator/author split would likely make "policing" users less necessary. When someone is forced to give up half their vote value to a stranger, they tend to try and game it somehow to keep more for themselves. If that split was say 75/25 or even 80/20 I would think they would be more likely to vote a little more altruistically, though that is just an assumption on my part.
Agreed, what we have right now isn't it, hopefully we can get some changes without having to wait another year or two.
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