Downvoting a voter seems like a more personal attack. It may lead to wars between people and groups.
Why not have a drop down box with a few options when you downvote "spam" "robot" "abusing" "plagiarism" etc. where constructive feedback can be given to authors and metrics can be aligned to better understand the behavior of the author.
People that get to that level of power by USING steemit and steem would know it was not personal as they would have been using the system for awhile. The only people this might be true of are people who BUY IN and power up with actual money.
Right now new people are seeing this as a PERSONAL ATTACK already. There are more of them than the big guys, and their perception is important to the growth of this platform. We can't fix this completely as it is an emotional thing, and often emotions are irrational. We could perhaps find a way to lessen this perception.
But shifting the system to align with only the current perception is a short term solution. Perhaps looking longer term, in how future participants may view downvoting a person versus a post, might be a better exercise. The community will likely grow and more will reach a point where they can influence others.
As an example, if after a while you have 10 posts and only one or two are downvoted, it is easier to see it as a constructive learning experience relating to some specific outputs. You might be able to identify a reason (which would be easier if a category was set by the downvoter to give specific feedback) of the concern. If multiple downvotes are occurring for the same reason, it sends a strong message from the community to the author.
But if the system is people downvoting 'you' then it is tough to learn anything or see it as anything but a personal attack on who you are.
The difference is "they didn't like that post" versus "they don't like me". That may create a hugely compounding problem as they may reciprocate and downvote the other 'person' in retribution (and get their friends to do the same). Not sure if that is healthy for the platform. I would rather have a structure which can provide constructive criticism for a post, rather than a person.
That said, I think the aggregation of constructive criticism over all an author's posts can and should reflect the overall reputation of that author.
An up vote is pretty obvious to people that the person liked something about it. It may not be specific, yet if they REALLY like it they usually comment and it becomes clear. The problem with a down vote is that it can happen without a WORD. It can have huge impact as weights are not equal for everyone. So I do think there needs to be a dialog box or something that accompanies a down vote that the person must pick from a couple of choices to use it. That way there is at least some meaningful information that the AUTHOR can react to, and perhaps learn from and get better.
THIS does work on other platforms. Yet other platforms are not paying money to people.
I believe when you see $1000 as something you are likely to get and then you come back an hour later and it is $10 and it was down voted by one person. That likely would feel DRAMATICALLY different than seeing a number go from 10 votes to 9 votes. Huge difference. This is speculation on my part as I have not had this happen. I have seen it happen to others and judging from the reaction it felt to them like someone stole from them.
This is a mental perception, and with all that people know it is a pretty accurate perception until they begin to grasp the fact that money does not actually belong to them until the end.
So when I am talking perceptions, I am talking about perhaps there are things that could be added to the page/UI layout to indicate POTENTIAL EARNINGS which could change. Have it so that can be hovered over or clicked on things to EDUCATE people on how the system works.
The perception is it is an attack and theft, until they learn how it works here.
So let's make it easier for them to learn.
Otherwise, we have the pissed off person storming off and talking about it to all the other social media places, news outlets, etc.
You cannot predict how bad that might be for growth of the platform.
It happened to @dollarvigilante because @berniesanders felt too many people had already posted similarly themed articles. How was @dollarvigilante supposed to know that? How would anyone? I already have trouble getting to some of my older articles, and that is just my personal ones. I refer to this PROBLEM as discoverability and since it is in beta I believe this is something that WILL get fixed. If not here, then by someone else building a "window" into the blockchain.
Yet there may be things we could do to stave off some of these negative perception issues and quickly educate people on the different paradigm.
What do you think?
I agree, for downvotes we need some type of drop-down reason selected. I proposed this in one of my crazy-ideas posts, along with a few other ideas in how to make curation better and bring more people into the community.
Steemit Proposal for Developer and Community Evaluation
https://steemit.com/steemit/@mrosenquist/steemit-proposal-for-developer-and-community-evaluation
Because doesn't solve the problem at hand.