Haejin enriched his account by doing self-interested voting with his stake. To solve this trending page "problem," STEEM institutionalized self-interested behavior by kicking back a percent of rewards to curators at the expense of taxing the HIVE of content creators. The real world transliteration for this is teaching every millionaire how to be a philanthropist. Steem didn't suppress self-interest. They merely reimagined it on a grander scale.

So congratulations, Steem has effectively caused Haejin to change his ways and adopt the philanthropist model of self-interested behavior. However, now, instead of just him doing it, it's everybody. And again, this philanthropist model of self-interest gets funded by taxing content creators one step after rewards get removed from the rewards pool. In essence, we traded off the so-called "reward pool rape" with reward rape via the 25% (or so) in extra taxation on rewards that get kicked back to curators.

So it was "terruible" when this one guy was "abusing the rewards pool" with his colossal stake in such a way where trending made it perfectly obvious. However, if we can get everyone to do the same thing, one step after the rewards get removed from the pool; Then somehow [..] we fixed something? Also, the idea of liberal downvoting was probably the worst idea ever. Watch 'Community' S05E08, 'Black Mirror' S03E01, and 'The Orville' S01E07; Please go back to the drawing board with that mess.

Either that or find a way to deal with antisocial downvoters. Haejin WAS NOT an antisocial downvoter. I rather have six Haejin's that overtly take from the reward pool based on their stake power. That would be so much more pleasant than the handful of malicious but powerful antisocial downvoters who covertly reward themselves on the taxes of those they upvote as they're running around downvoting people because they don't like their politics. It's those powerful bastards that drive people away and make HIVE the veritable ghostship (anise-flavored) lollypop of social media infamy.

It shouldn't have been that hard to encourage "right" behavior in the first place. Taking CliffsNotes from dystopic science fiction was Steem's first and most colossal mistake. PoB does not work as imagined. Up and downvoting by random people with different amounts of stake-power will never equate to something intelligent. The best we can do is encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior.

Giving everyone a free downvote and encouraging them to use it daily is tantamount to giving everyone a gun and a free daily bullet and encouraging people to use it on others. It was a bogus move and should get rolled back. The UI change with the downvote especially. If voting up, down, or both doesn't amount to an intelligent result (crowd wisdom), then let's stick with the positive curation model—one where you upvote what you enjoy and disregard what you do not. And this emulates the market more accurately. Also, we wouldn't have to rewire the brains of each new person that comes to HIVE. That's not to say get rid of flags, as there are legit use cases for flagging.

Either that or find an intelligent way to censor the downvote power of people who misuse it. There's a reason in a society that we don't let mass shooters run amok, and it's because they go around causing harm, permanent injury, and death. The HIVE equivalent of death is becoming so demoralized by the voting behavior of others that you're willing to interact on platforms run by Zuckerberg, Dorsey, or Wojcicki. Sorry, your rant triggered mine, and there you have it, a dialogue. That's one positive aspect I can speak to about HIVE (the free speech aspect), but I know we can get gud. And if HIVE doesn't want to pave the way, hopefully, the Proof of Brain community will set the standard.

I care much less about the hurt feelings of a handful of malicious downvoters than I do about those whose experience they keep wrecking because they get their jollies off on exercising raw and destructive power to the detriment of the platform. I realize that you are just one guy and that you don't represent the HIVE collective as a whole. Half the reason for posting this comment here is so some of the other influential hearts and minds can read it and resonate with the parts that make sense to them.

Here's an idea, make the downvote function wipe out curation rewards first. If a post is so bad that it didn't deserve an upvote, then pit curator whales against each other where they can null each other's curation rewards. This way, when you have people complaining about malicious downvotes, they'll be powerfully affected, motivated, and influential enough to care about devising a scheme that reduces the reckless downvoting.

I'd much rather see whales have reward fights than watch the platform continue to bleed out the types of content creators that give life and vibrance to the HIVE ecosystem. "The rate of antisocial personality disorder in the general population is estimated between 0.2 and 3.3 percent." So here's the trolly problem. Create a DV censorship scheme whereby a stakeholder can get their DV power suspended for a period if they abuse their power would frustrate a whole 0.2 - 3.3 percent of HIVE-folk. However, that's not nearly as troublesome as their actions.