So, I've been reading all the downvote comments and discussions of the EIP (Economic Improvement Proposal) and I want to share a few thoughts. If you don't know what I am talking about there are likely 2 posts you should read.
EIP - Economic Improvement Proposal:
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/improving-the-economics-of-steem-a-community-proposal
As one part of that proposal is the addition of a downvote pool:
https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/downvote-pool-deep-dive
First of all, I have mixed feelings about EIP, but I've seen so many comments questioning whether we need downvotes at all and YES, downvotes are very important to the economy. I feel like lack of downvoting is a huge part of the reason we are stagnant.
I am not talking about a couple of bully whales picking on people for no good reason other than having thin skin and not being able to handle the idea that others have a different opinion. My opinion is that those downvotes are a bad idea, but still the right of the stakeholder. Other invested stakeholders should offset bad actors, and they just haven't.
I am talking about fighting abuse. Plagariasts and Spammers and those who want to post a few snapshots or a youtube video and use bots to upvote it.
In a decentralized economy with no authority, the solution built in to manage our investment and keep our partners from embezzling it is downvotes.
I don't care about the "Down Vote" pool and I am neither for or against the EIP, but I do think some of you need to consider how the lack of downvotes has impacted investments.
The Inflation Pool should be for building a struggling economy. Every day when the blockchain prints new Steem it devalues the current Steem unless we do things to create value.
It's my opinion that holding Steem should be enough incentive to flag those who are not adding value, and I do not think our Stakeholders are suddenly going to be committed to protecting their investment because of a code change, but I do want to reinforce that if downvotes were being used properly haejin wouldn't be haejin and we wouldn't have so many scammers and spammers. If people thought there was a realistic chance of getting downvoted they would use the bidbots more sparingly.
So, come up with your own opinions on the EIP and the downvote pool, but keep in mind without downvotes we have no way to impact scammers, spammers, illegal activity and abuse.
Here are some Downvote Worthy posts!
This user is bidboting blurry pictures to trending each day for nebulous reasons.
https://steemit.com/digital/@abrockman/nebulous-series-179-or-aj-brockman
This guy also upvotes his snapshot level art to just off trending each day
https://steemit.com/india/@mehta/indoor-wedding-dinner-colorchallenge-friday-sky-blue
Imagine if some of that Steem in the above posts was being directed to onboarding or curation projects? Or at least to retain content creators that care about the future of Steem. Imagine if bernie's shit posts were still encouraging engagement and distribution or all Traf's self upvotes we being directed towards building the economy.. See, we are wasting a lot of Inflation and we are spinning our wheels. While I can fully understand either supporting EIP or being opposed as there are valid reasons to do both... Don't kid yourself about the importance of downvotes.
We all are aware of several large accounts that have several accounts that they post from and upvote each day. In a perfect world, the other stakeholder would oppose abuse and abusive downvotes.
It isn't happening and maybe a code change will fix that. Frankly, I doubt it.
However, as long as the entire inflation pool just goes to stack tokens I find it unlikely we will see growth. We should be allocating the Inflation Pool to things that add value.
What are your thoughts?
Downvoting is important but there are at least two general limitations. 1) you need Steem power to effectively reduce overvalued rewards and 2) you put yourself out there for retaliation, which in my opinion is the main reason the current proposal will not work ... and why people hesitate to downvote now.
One solution would be for the community (aka a witness or Steemit) to create a downvote bot that people can submit requests for downvoting. The name could be @communitywatch. Importantly, people could submit these requests as encrypted memos so at the end of the day no one knows who flagged them, eliminating the possibility for retaliation. Now, the problem is how will people abuse this system? Good question! I don’t know. The specifics would need to be worked out but the bot could limit the number of of downvotes submitted by a specific user, such as 2 a day. Or it could limit it so one user could only downvote another user so many times a week. Something like that. I don’t know what the right balance would be.
This type of system would also give minnows more power and since they make up the most accounts, watchdogs would be everywhere.
Another question would be how strong a downvote should be cast for a given submission? I don’t know the solution to this. If one post gets many submissions for downvoting, maybe the strength of the downvote exponentially increases.
My initial thought is all requests should be 0.001 Steem or something like that so everyone can freely submit requests. Maybe it should be higher if needed to compensate the person running the account. Maybe Steemit could delegate stake to the account that is just sitting idle. Alternatively the community could delegate Steem power.
This is just a rambling idea I have had for a while. What are your thoughts? I have to imagine individuals would be more likely to go after powerful bad actors if they weren’t afraid their Steem account would get downvoted to dust.
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All these calculations and rules don't really work well in this place.
If you think it adds value upvote it, if you don't care about it leave it alone. If you think it devalues your investment downvote it.
It will never be a fair system executed the same way, the idea of freedom is freedom. Each person should use their stake to influence the system. If you don't have stake, you don't have influence.
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I feel like anonymous downvoting would be another can of worms to deal with but, I absolutely agree with you @sepracore, that minnows do not use downvoting because of the fear of retaliation and having witnessed whales unleash bot downvoting platoons on minnows who crossed them (whether on purpose or sometimes even accidentally or unknowingly).
The downvoting tool (as it currently exists) is the chief reason why Steemit is not my favorite platform to share.
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I agree that anonymous downvoting is not ideal but I just don’t see any other way.
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Minnows should not downvote, it does not make sense to waste vp on what literally has so little impact that it won't even reflect in the dollar amount. That's not who should be doing the policing, the policing should almost be exclusively handled by large accounts, dolphins and higher.
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Greetings @sepracore
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I've followed your downvote recommendations, and now I'm scared about retaliation. If one watches how long it takes to build up a rep, one has good reason to be afraid of 70+ steemians.
I'm quite sure that this is the flaw, plus the lack of a downvote culture you mentioned...
I hope my account is still there tomorrow ;) , but you are right, and it does take some courage and responsibility to live decentralised.
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My question is, as a Minnow or plankton if I downvote a whale and they retaliate would I ever be able to earn as an author?
Also I have seen cases where someone disagrees with the topic and then downvotes the post, is that not a form of censorship as the author might just stop posting?
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They could kill your account but to be honest I've never seen it happen. Even Bernie gets bored of it if the user doesn't make a fuss.
No, it is not a form of censorship as the post still goes in the blockchain, it is a form of removing rewards.
Yes, the Author may stop posting, but I don't think they would take it so hard if it was a cultural norm.
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BOLLOCKS
BOLLOCKS
BOLLOCKS
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Unless tou egg it on
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Thank you for the clear answer. It was two questions that always crossed my mind when reading these type of discussions.
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Changing or obscuring content is censorship. There is no definition of censorship in any widely accepted source that defines censorship only as complete elimination of content. Even before blockchains, such total elimination was almost impossible after the advent of the printing press. Access to the blockchain data is limited for most people to that revealed by front ends, as few folks can code their own. Censoring the front ends is effective censorship. Worse than downvoting as censorship is Steemit lately censoring creators itself, which prevents individuals from controlling their own feeds of information. See Github's irredeemable list for specific accounts so censored.
For examples of creators being crushed by flagging, have a look at @skeptic's account.
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I flag trash. You have received a flag.
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The two issues with downvoting are that it earns you nothing (unless Steem Flag Rewards gives you votes) and it risk retaliation. The whales and orcas could deal with it, but choose not to, with some exceptions. It is dispiriting to see that abuse.
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Exactly, the ones who could easily turn this place around are sitting on their hands or delegating to the various vote selling schemes. We saw during the Whale Experiment that a few whales/orcas joining together could do just that, the only issue was that they were sacrificing to do so. I hope we can delegate our entire downvote vests so that this incredibly important resource will not be wasted, no matter how small any one account is in that regard, together we can assemble like Voltron, or even better, captain planet :D.
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I think linking to relevant content should be encouraged to engage more with readers of comments.
You good with that?
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Oh snap, this might be bad for me. Some people on Steem don't like my personality and the way I look! I'm going to be in trouble! LOL 😅😅😅
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lol sounds like so many haters
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I’ll just try to get more steem power to blast them back! Downvote wars are coming 😂😂🙌🏼
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All in steem, becoming a whale. Deal.
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haha. If each person uses their stake to curation what they think adds value and what removes value it will all be fine.
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This part makes all the sense, I agree with you 100%
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Yeah, no one is going to repeatedly buy votes if the profit is downvoted out of them.
Just downvote and move on. If you receive a downvote just move on.
Bunch of damn snowflakes. :)
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The reality is that downvotes are never going to fix the excessive rewards issue. It may have an impact on plagiarism, and new account spammers, but never on excessive payouts. I just did a check to remove $10.00 value from a post you need 500,000.00 SP that's five hundred thousand Steem Power. At 100% your downvote in that case would be ten dollars. The example post has a payout of $168.00+. With out the ability to decrease the reward givers vote/curation reward then the downvote is meaningless and only has an effect on smaller accounts.
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From the $168 payout $18 would be curation rewards and probably about $100 spent for bidbots, this making about $50 netto, half of that locked in Steem Power.
Minus $10 payouts might have a crucial role here.
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Which means the currency still is too valuable at this time considering the distribution. ;)
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Yeah, except that is exactly how the Whale Experiment worked. So much for 'the reality'. The reality is that downvoting can fix excessive rewards, and that was thoroughly proven over and over again during the experiment. It can because it has been done before.
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This is why I proposed the Huey Long algorithm to limit payouts to a multiple of the median. This allows for orders of magnitude difference in incentive between good and less good content, but removes the incentive to profiteer from financially manipulating curation, which destroys curation.
Capital gains should be the reason to invest, not profiteering.
Thanks!
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I flag trash. You have received a flag.
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Just noticed there is NO option to downvote on Partiko..
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The possibility to flag is indeed very important. I fail to understand why there needs to be a separate pool. It won't change my behaviour but may lead to a more toxic atmosphere. Not a worthy trade off.
But worst of all. We are talking about downvotes while we still don't have SMTs!
Priorities, people.
One positive proposal is the modified rewards curve. That might actually improve Steem
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I agree with you.
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I so want to flag you know.
Or punch a baby kitten.
Ps: I will not harm any kittens
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What, exactly, do you think smteees! will do for us?
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I think downvotes are important too. It is just a completely different feeling to give someone a downvote rather than an upvote. I want to downvote but mostly I hang in my personal feed. I upvote the content there because I like the people I follow. Who would've guessed? I never go to the trending tab because I know it is broken.
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I don't think it is that broken there are lot's of great posts there promoting work, businesses and projects. Mixed in are a few scammy people who know no one is curating.
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Well, you're right. I'm just mad lol.
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Excellent contribution to the debate. Downvoted for visibility :-D
Seriously, I also don't know why everyone fears there's gonna be retaliation. Of course there will be. This stuff happens all the time on YouTube as well. Getting fewer rewards on a shirt notice shouldn't matter if overall we get better content and a higher price (thus higher rewards) in the long run.
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Perfect! :) I think downvotes are good for the economy, I understand those who don't feel they have been unfairly targeted and in some cases they are right. So, there are valid reasons for either side.
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Interesting about these @whatsup, and with a pool of downvotes it wouldn't be considered wasting your VP. It's got the potential to really shake things up now you have given me this perspective.
Still, there will be some retaliation and it's going to go a little crazy for a while if that pool is used for Trending articles.
Who's is going to have the balls to set a trend down voting the likes of those two authors, because of their unrealistic rewards?
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I already downvote them. Maybe you haven't noticed, but I downvote something on trending nearly every day. I do for my investment and yours!
There have been a few that downvoted me back. I figure that is the cost of doing business in a market.
Yes, it's going to get messy for a bit if these changes go through and some will leave, but some will stay. :)
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messy in the beginning lol yep! sounds fun. i only hope that what i do does not impact others, that is a fear of mine. also i would expect us non bloggers to be the ones to downvote the most. especially if 50/50 comes in. We have the least to lose and most to gain in my thinking anyway
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I do admit the drama potential is HUGE. :)
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No shit, Sherlock.
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haha, I had a flashback to 1985
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Maybe if downvotes were anonymous, people would use them more
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That was the basis for my response at the top of this comments section. I agree that anonymous downvoting is a possible solution.
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Steemit:
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Hi, @whatsup!
You just got a 0.33% upvote from SteemPlus!
To get higher upvotes, earn more SteemPlus Points (SPP). On your Steemit wallet, check your SPP balance and click on "How to earn SPP?" to find out all the ways to earn.
If you're not using SteemPlus yet, please check our last posts in here to see the many ways in which SteemPlus can improve your Steem experience on Steemit and Busy.
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Actually i am still yet to know much or let me say deep about this downvote topic. But I feared hope it will not really pursue a lot of people away due to the effect. Open to contributions
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