I am very much an austrian economist and anarcho capitalist with full support for voluntarism. I am also dealing with the limits of game theory.
I don't like down votes, I would prefer for the whole system to be positive. A downvote is really a more efficient way of saying "upvote everything else but X".
Absent downvotes, all manner of abuses are possible. So while I agree with your desire for an "upvote" only system, it is like asking for "world peace".
I can try for "world peace"... though it is a hard problem. :) Like I said I view my Devil's Advocate stuff with you as trying to make the system better. I know you cannot do everything and some problems are pretty "hard". Yet I also know you likely prefer people to be honest with you and not just agree. :) All of the articles you have written have been well thought out. You gave me a lot to think about. Thinking about is not the same as coding it though, so I realize you have a very hard task.
Thanks for saying that. I'd only heard it from other people so my "hearsay" reference was because I had only heard it from others and could not confirm it. It was not meant to imply that you were not. (don't know if you saw it that way or not but I realized after the fact it might come off that way).What kind of abuses do you view as possible that couldn't be solved by a flag with spam, plagiarism, or abusive as options?
Truly would like to know as I haven't seen those. Feel free to use that maybe as a topic for another one of your blog posts. :)
I agree, people should have to have the option to reward and punish, but without using force. The steemit system utilizes this concept perfectly, in the voluntarist way.
It's their opinion, if they like something, they promote it, if they don't then they downvote it. It's the only way to keep steemit full of high quality content and remove spam.
I don't usually think in terms of absolutes, so while it is a way. I know it is not the ONLY way. You could remove SPAM by allowing a downvote/flag/report post that popped a selection menu with a very limited amount of options for which it could be used.
It is a more distributed opinion based system. It's much better if the community removes spam, than if 1 moderator. It tunes more into the demand of the readers, and it removes the possibility of a corrupted moderator (one that downvotes competitors).