I've been a huge advocate of downvotes, but I stopped using most of mine due to some of outrageous downvotes of the large accounts and trails.
Most of us will handle a downvote or two with dignity and class, but when one group decides another is bad and has a huge amount of voting power, I was turned off quickly.
I also think that SBI was a great project and I think it is clear anytime you look at Trending that curation isn't about quality, so I have no idea what the puritans are fussing about some projects like SBI that does good work and helps with retention is.
I've always felt that the biggest Steem stakeholders often conduct themselves in ways that reflect very poorly on the Steem community as a whole. Giving them more downvoting and destructive power was bound to end badly.
The "I can do whatever I want with my stake" power-play mentality should be replaced with a "I will use my stake to nurture and support the community, especially newcomers and smaller accounts with original content".
Some whales have been supportive since Steem inception since 2016, but in-fighting has always been way too prominent on this platform. I hope this improves, but until then personally I'm pretty passive here.
The thing is that we didn't give them more power, they gave it to themselves. The largest accounts provided the most support for the EIP.
That is the weakness of a Stakebased system. (DPOS) One of the most difficult elements of decentralization is the big decisions are not made by the most qualified or educated, or with the most experience the decisions are made by those with Stake.
The largest Stakesholder mined the most in the early days. Which also is not a skill set I would necessarily equate with building a social media site. :)
Sometimes understanding HOW something works is better than deciding how it should work.
In my opinion many of the whales could care less about the social network and it shows.
I am currently only a minnow, but what kind of social network do you (and some other people) talking about? Where is the social side? The majority of the Steem blockchain users are selfish and greedy. They focus only about their own blog posts, and they do not care other people's blog posts. There are ~ 30 000 posts made every day, but the average number of comments is only around 3. And most of these comments are bot and/or spam-like comments. Nowadays the real human interaction is rare on the Steem blockchain. If the majority of the Steem blockchain users are selfish and greedy, then why do they except any different action from the whales?
Good point. That's why I say if you want engagement, engage.
Sometimes there are shades of right and wrong ..
like I want you to find my content and upvote me... That's not a good idea, it isn't likely to happen.
Also wrong, I'm going to ignore everyone else, but I want to be successful.
We want decentralization, but we also want to cry to authority when we don't like what is happening...
Pick one. :) Good comment
Thank you for being reasonable.
I stopped to but started using them on intro abuse some account above rep 53 make 6 or 7 of them than I use my downvotes instantly
I have mixed feelings about downvotes... There is a case for them, but I think that there is a problem with them being consequence free. Like all things, no risk of consequences leads to some odd behaviours... For instance, if you can crash a world economy (GFC) through consequence free actions and still be rich... Why not do it?
Proportionate downvoting is useful to signal disagreement... But what is chump change for one is a huge hit for another. It takes some level of wisdom to understand that instead of mashing 100%
SBI does well with long term support, and this is a model that is great for retention (the weakness of Steem). The curation projects are great, but having sugar hit means you need more of them...
Agree. I still don’t know why people labeled themselves as some sort of “Steemit Police” Who cares if someone is using a tag several times instead of one time? Who are we to downvote zero quality posts? Do we create more valuable and quality content ourselves? Just have fun posting bogs and comments and just don’t always look at what others are doing. There is never consensus about what is quality and what is not. You post blogs to ventilate your opinion which you like others to read in my opinion. Live and let live
I would agree fully with you if it weren't for the fact that STEEM is supposed to have value. If certain behaviours were not discouraged, we would find the chain completely overrun with bot accounts which would drain the value of STEEM to zero. If someone could run a million accounts and pick up a few cents on them daily... well, this would be a disaster.
I wasn’t talking about bots.
They're vigilante mobs. Steem is a libertarian utopia. If you want "law and order" you have to make it yourself (through consensus building).
What do you think about perhaps requiring an active post as a prerequisite for downvoting (or voting in general). If you have no active posts (less than 7 days old), then you are frozen out of the whole upvote/downvote game.
If comments were counted as posts it would be ok with me.
Yes, the goal is to simply have the downvoters put some "skin in the game". A comment or reply is able to be downvoted (or upvoted), so that would "expose" them to their own "law of the jungle" standard.
(I thought I had replied to this...)...
I'm afraid that if you have an active post but you just don't care about it... then it isn't really a consequence. There is no loss, as nothing is staked that you actually care about!
It does expose you to downvotes from higher-rep accounts. There are some accounts that level-up to (45) or so and then erase all their posts and comments, power-up a few thousand steem-power and then go around power stomping smaller accounts with IMPUNITY. This seems to be a problem.
It would not be that bad making one comment every week would it?
Well its a social media platform, so maybe it would provide proof of engagement?
Why would it be a negative in your eyes ?
It would expose them to retaliation.
If I'm bullet-proof, I can shoot down anyone I wish with impunity.
If I'm bullet-vulnerable, I'll probably be slightly more careful who I shoot down, in order to mitigate potential retribution.
Do you think it's better to have accounts like bloom, who do nothing but downvote?
And since they never post, they can act with impunity?
Let's just say, hypothetically, that the Chinese Censorship Brigade decided they wanted to create an account (or buy an existing account) with (a relatively small) 2 million steem-power and start obliterating any accounts they didn't like (anything not written in Chinese).
And since this account makes zero posts, they cannot be downvoted themselves.
Would you consider that a "problem" or would you stand by your, "downvotes are freespeech" credo?
Thanks for telling me what I think. Please explain WHY you think that. What's the "problem" with requiring an active post (or comment) as a prerequisite for upvoting/downvoting?
Accounts with high-rep can downvote anyone with lower rep than them below (0) which automatically hides all their posts and comments and breaks any links to their posts and comments.
If a rogue account had an active post, at least there would be a chance that a higher-rep account could take action to reduce their rep, thus mitigating the amount of damage they could wreak by reducing the number of accounts they could de facto censor wholesale.
Yes, even if they were ranked below (0) they could still wipe out rewards on individual posts and or comments, but they couldn't wipe out ENTIRE ACCOUNTS.
Getting downvoted by an account with lower rep than you does not affect your rep.
Getting downvoted by an account with higher rep than you KILLS your rep.
By forcing an active post, the downvoters could potentially be downvoted by a higher-rep account, and thus lose their rep, which would take away their ability to KILL other people's rep.