Rather than put their stake at risk, I think a more reasonable solution would be to put their downvotes at risk. There should be a mechanic to partially silence/weaken annoying downvoters temporarily by casting a counteractive downvote. Perhaps by a feature allowing people to go to the abusive profile and downvote to remove their allotment of daily downvotes. It would require an equal amount of stake to totally silence/weaken the staked downvotes of an abuser.
This does sound like an interesting notion. The idea that a community could band together to reduce the effects of a errant downvoter is a good idea. After all, it is the sort of banding together that shows that a greater group of people think that that sort of behaviour is more anti-social and counter to the good value of STEEM.
However, like you said, it is a solution with probably unintended consequences... like every change to every system...
Yes disproportionate downvoting is a real problem. Perhaps there should be something to restrict the power to accounts of the same size... that way, if people want to play downvote wars, they can... and stay in the same weight class. Perhaps a certain proportion of the downvote (depending on the relative account sizes) is free, and then the rest would have to be "funded".
Agreed... everything that I suggested would have unintended consequences... glaring obvious depends on the perspective.....
However, it would be incredibly naive to think that the status quo doesn't also have some unintended consequences as well... things sort of work as they are, but is that due to a stable situation and inventives that can scale up (which I believe that you think?) or is it due to the fact that at the moment we are tiny and the effects of good actors can match the bad as it is all relatively easy to keep track of (as I think...).
I'm not against downvoting as a concept and I'm not advocating a flag police either. However, I do believe the mere principle of no consequence actions is not really something that should exist in an adult society (or even a child one!).
No, I think good stake can win... as long as it always remains "good"... however, this is like having a benevolent dictator... it is good, until it is bad. I don't think there should be more rules or anything like that as such... I think that there should be a risk and consequence for actions like upvoting and downvoting... instead of free (rc doesn't count, as that is essentially unlimited), as freedom from cost and consequences has not played out well in the financial sectors of modern times! Crash the economy, who goes to jail? Who gets bailed out? Who loses their jobs? Who gets the golden handshake? We don't want to re-create the idea of consequence free hazards... or do we?
Um, I think you've confused my suggestion with someone else's. I agreed with them about it being an interesting idea but one that I didn't think would work due to the points that you also said. However, I answered so many replies I might well have accidentally agreed to the wrong thing by accident. Anyway, my position on requiring a post of comment to upvote or downvote is exactly the end as yours.
My suggestion was that up/down voting gave some sort of cost... Perhaps proportional to the amount of vests that would be allocated. However, this would mean that downvotes cost disproportionately more as there would not be any 'anti-curation' rewards. But I think that these actions shouldn't be effectively cost free.
Edit: Yup, definitely my fault! Apologies. I had answered without making myself clear. I think I had made those points (same as yours) in a different thread... Somewhere.