Is there ever really any reason to downvote a post?

jukkamic (52) in steem • 9 years ago

It seems there are monetary benefits on upvoting posts and only negative effects on downvoting. Have I misunderstood something?

If I understand correctly, the "value" of a post is based on the net positive votes the post gets. And the voters are the curators who get their share of the value. This is based partly on this story here: https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/how-to-interpret-steemits-post-valuations

So why would anyone interested in their steem dollars ever downvote any post?

I am sure everyone can see the potential problems for steemit if this is true.

steem

9 years ago by jukkamic (52)

$0.56

5 votes

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clains (68) · 9 years ago

Whales want the platform to succeed, so they'll downvote content that they think lowers the value of the platform. Here's an example. :D

$32.63

2 votes

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linouxis9 (57) · 9 years ago

You see that @dantheman upvoted you :-)

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clains (68) · 9 years ago

Yes :D

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dantheman (73) · 9 years ago

Crabs downvote because that's what crabs do. Their incentive is the good feeling they get when they stop someone else from getting something undeserved.

The Story of the Crab Bucket

A man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and had live crabs inside.

"Why don't you cover your bait bucket so the crabs won't escape?", he said.

"You don't understand.", the man replied, "If there is one crab in the bucket it would surely crawl out very quickly. However, > when there are many crabs in the bucket, if one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down > so that it will share the same fate as the rest of them."

So it is with people. If one tries to do something different, get better grades, improve herself, escape her environment, or dream big dreams, other people will try to drag her back down to share their fate.

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

$0.03

3 votes

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pharesim (74) · 9 years ago

I don't need monetary incentive to downvote spam. I don't want to see that stuff on here, that's enough for a reason.

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1 vote

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jukkamic (52) · 9 years ago

I should have emphasized on my post that I meant strictly economically speaking. That aspect will surely be very relevant to many users and as someone else already said, people might upvote the so-called "Kim Kardashian of posts" simply in the belief most others will too. Only to gain something in monetary terms.

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