I beg to differ. This currency ONLY has value because of the platform.
This platform is billing itself as a social media platform and yet major players are acting in a way that is decidedly anti-social. This is already alienating existing users and those users are leaving and taking their entire social networks with them to new places where they don't have to deal with this.
The concept that we have here where downvotes work as an income redistribution mechanism is in the most literal sense, no different than the government coming to your bank, seeing you have too much money and taking that money to redistribute to others.
Either we earn the money on our own merits or we don't. Once earned, taking it back to give to others, simply because the person taking the money has more money than the person being taken from is a form of fascism and I'm surprised any of you support this.
This is a design flaw you're calling a feature, and I've been calling it out since July. As the price declines, the rewards pool shrinks. Money is a form of energy and as energy leaves the system, there is no longer sufficient energy for all players to have their needs met. Thus you have larger entities predating on smaller entities.
Simplest solutions that would boost the price of steem to historic highs.
Kill curation rewards. No one deserves to make money for clicking an upvote button and the fact people are using a bot to do that proves my point, sorry but true.
Take the money that is presently being used for curation and add it to the comments pool. If comments are paid more highly, more people will comment. Commenting at least requires SOME effort. It increases stickiness and user participation and this increases excitement about the platform.
Remove downvoting. Keep it as flagging and the flagger should suffer the same financial penalty as the person being flagged. This would mean that people would only flag in the most egregious cases of trolling, copyright infringement etc. If you don't like that some content is so highly paid, then go find content you do like and use your power to upvote that. It would have the same net effect.
This currency has almost no value left because it does not empower people, it only reproduces the same power structure that we already have ( the 1% controlling the 99%) This is the reason steem is almost worthless eventhought the tech is the most advanced.
The money is not earned until the end of the voting period. This is why to avoid users getting upset we just have to hide payout or just give an estimation, but this is an interface issue.
Donwvoting is an integral part of the system
Its an antisocial behavior on a social network. That's the a definition of, design flaw.
It is alienating to every person on the receiving end and it's a forceable redistribution of wealth. Which is what makes it shocking to me that you guys are in support of a fascist system.
The foundation of a home is also an integral part of a system. But if that foundation begins to subside incorrectly the house will crack split and fall begin to crumble.
There are three choices when this happens.
I couldn't disagree more about removing curation rewards:
*w.r.t. point 1, see The Myth of AI, A Conversation with Jaron Lanier
While you're talking about people have the right to vote as they see fit, you talked about removing the incentives to vote from them. It sounds not right to me.
While people vote to give others author rewards, they also get some for themselves. IMHO the more they get and the more they give to the chosen few, the less others will get. Thus less people will be happy. This kind of behavior was driving out users already.
I agree that current design is flawed. However, even within a flawed system, we can still try our best to play as positively as possible, before it get fixed. Everyone tries to milk the system then nobody will win.
I'm not saying that what I'm doing has no downside. I mean, there are trade-offs.
Thanks for expressing your opinion.
People will vote for content and people they like regardless of curation rewards. Your experiment is proof if that.
However removing the curation rewards, kills all the voting bots that are there to game the curation rewards system.
My point is that downvoting is absolutely necessary, what if a rich pedophile started to upvote all his kiddie porn content to the trending page?
Im not sure about your analogy but if you think the foundation is what is flawed on steemit you are wrong, the blockchain works as it should, the social/emotional stuff should be dealt with a the interface level.
I didn't say that downvoting was incorrect I said it suffers from a design flaw. Your example proves my point. The entire community could come along and flag the dude and nothing would happen. It would require someone else who is rich enough to counter that...
This is the definition of a design flaw.
Stake based weighting does not work and the current war is proving that to be true. Voting needs to be isolated and seperate from censorship. Censorship should reflect the values of the Democratic majority not the economic majority.
Let's look at your example. Who defines minor or explicit content? In some countries it is illegal and even pornographic for a female of any age to be in a bikini or even a 1 piece swimsuit. Yet in other countries it is illegal for women to wear a so called burkini which covers too much, because it's a sign she is part of a radicalized sect.
This needs a rethink because at the moment, all control is in the hands of the economic majority and the Democratic majority has very nearly no say in the matter. Thus the values of the system already reflect only the values of the rich. It is only by luck that those who are in the whale category happen to have a set of values that align with what's left of our active user base.
What happens when some advertising company buys a large stake and begins to spam the site with advertisements and upvotes their own ads as an additional revenue stream? They suddenly begin to claim a disproportionate share of the rewards pool. What happens when other advertisers see this, begin to run their own ads and use their weight to censor the content of competitors.
It's a complex problem, there are no simple solutions but this is what I mean by a design flaw. Integral or not, this has issues. Significant issues that need significant thought applied. In the meantime, the only currency this site really has is the good will of the community and the current experiment is burning through that most limited of resources.
I admit it has had a positive effect on the reward pool. I admit it may have directly driven the current rise in price.
It's still flawed. Flagging should be democratic and it should have as much impact on the person giving as the person receiving.
We can stop bot votes by ditching curation rewards. Then the only bot votes left and really the only reason to vote would be solidarity. Which is really the only reason you should vote in the first place. Leave the stealing to the government , upvote what and who you like.
Someone recently suggested that we could all have equal downvote power but the upvote power will be stake based. I thought it was interesting and worth exploring but there was some sybil issue with it that should be addressed first.
"Stake based weighting does not work "
capitalism*