Sure there is. It's called the flag. Use it to report abusive, spam, and plagiarism. Even reddit if you go look at it has a REPORT mechanism. It is the words REPORT POST right below any comment/post.
I do know we need that. I have not advocated not having that. I do not see us needing a down vote due to someone disliking something, or thinking someone should not be able to pay another person X amount.
People already get pretty upset with down votes on places like reddit. I believe adding in the visible drop in financial earnings is likely to turn into a force multiplier for that anger.
Hmmm.... so if the penalty for speeding was to be reported rather than fined, do you think enforcement would be effective? Without an economic penalty I think the vast majority of bad actors would not be deterred from bad actions.
And report to whom? And what are 'they' going to do about the reports? Do we report to centralized authority who then censors the offender? That's how reddit rolls and some of their moderators are swine.
"Downvoting is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
See what I did there? :D
The problem is... you are still talking about reporting. I am talking about down votes on posts simply because you disagree with them, or don't think they are worth as much as someone else wanted to pay them. We still need a reporting mechanism and yes it should FINE them.
We do have this and it is even shaped like a flag. However, it is being used to penalize people due to opinion.
That is from my blog post.
I can speak from experience on this point - one of my posts made No. 1 on the front page and was worth about $8k. Shortly before payout a bunch of downvotes showed up and knocked the payout down to $5k. I was pissed! Not because they downvoted, but because they downvoted without commenting and telling me why they downvoted. I think they just wanted the reward reduced, which is not an action that should be condoned.
So here's my thoughts - downvotes only get applied if they are accompanied by a comment that is upvoted by someone other than the OP and the down voter. Boom!
Still thinking about this... so you deserve extra replies. Hope you don't mind.
WHO DO WE REPORT TO? WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
Yes, I do see that conundrum.
It could be abused. I'd like to see the flag come up as a choice of plagiarism, spam, abusive.
People could still false flag. So how do we deal with that? I think Dan's down voting flags if they are false flags is not a bad idea.
However, I am seeing a number of people being flagged simply for disagreement, or anger, or spite, or retaliation for being flagged. We've seen these things on reddit as well.
Yet there they do not also reduce monetary income. I believe it could be much worse here.
We have a pretty civil and intelligent group of people here now. It likely won't always be thus.
Yes, you're describing the dreaded bad whale attack. Zuckerberg powers up a few dozen whale accounts and goes to town destroying everyone's reputations... Steemit dies. Right now the defense is for the good whales to catch the bad whales before they do too much damage, but that is a not a good long term solution.
I think my suggestion of validating flags/downvotes by upvotes might be a good way forward.
Wrote a post about this, have a read and let me know what you think: https://steemit.com/steemit/@johnsmith/how-to-solve-the-downvote-conundrum-with-one-simple-trick-upvoting-downvotes