This post needs to be at the top of trending for a full year. And then added to a Steemit FAQ, or something.
Upvotes and downvotes are tools to allocate stake. They are the same action, just opposite of each other.
This is the way I've tried to explain it in the past:
If a user feels a post is under-rewarded, he will upvote.
If a user feels a post is over-rewarded, he will downvote.
There's nothing more to it than that. It's a huge double standard that people feel people have the "right" to upvote their content with their full stake, allocating them STEEM, but somehow lack the right to use that same stake to allocate STEEM away to other users.
There have been several members who have enjoyed the regular - sometimes automatic - support of heavy-stake users for every post. They've said nothing. But as soon as another big user has noticed this, and countered with a downvote, all of a sudden it's a huge problem that one user has this much power of the post payouts.
But one user upvoting the posts to big payouts was never a problem. Go figure.
That's the whole point of STEEM power: a say in that particular portion of the reward pool.
Payouts are not your money until the voting window closes. I think this is the biggest hangup a lot of people have.
They are potential payouts, subject to community consensus.
I've tried my damnest to say this so many times. In so many ways.
I agree with everything you said and also wanted to add (as I've mentioned in previous posts I linked to) that a full flag does have other side effects such as hiding the post by default and impacting the reputation score. If people just used them to adjust payouts, that would be great, but they also use them to blow away all value on a post vindictively. I hope we can improve all interfaces to the Steem blockchain to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
lol, what about a flag also costs you money!!! You start with -8.66% on your steempower. If you spend your votes on flagging, you will lose the inflation/dilution game. But hey, better not tell the community this, and keep the mantra alife, don't selfvote, vote on others good content, and flag bad content.
That way, the rewards-pool is distributed to the very few in the know, that sing this flag and don't selfvote mantra for 2 years now...
"Costs you money" implies money is yours or owed to you in some way. It costs you opportunity cost, for sure. No one is denying that. Please reference the Github issues I mentioned in my post which are attempts to change that.
People are free to do what they want with their stake, even if it means demonstrating the Steem blockchain is short-sighted, the rewards system can not curate valuable content via Proof of Brain, and (if we continue with this thought experiment) investors should sell and move to other projects (which destroys the value for everyone). I personally prefer a different path forward. We all have a financial incentive to make Steem work and that includes protecting the value of the rewards pool as a shared collaborative commons. If we don't use the tools at our disposal to do that (including downvotes), then we'll get what we deserve and other projects will be more successful.
Thx for your reply. I agree.