There is a very simple solution that a far narrower than what was proposed here, which is to restore downvote as an option with no rep damage. Flag would be for abuse (and I'd suggest requiring a comment). Downvote would be for expressing disagreement on the consensus to award a (larger) payout.
Without the stigma attached to accusatory downvotes/flags, upvotes and downvotes can find a dynamic balance where the posts with the most favorable balance earn the most rewards. I suspect many of the largest rewards would be reduced which would support the goal many have expressed to flatten payouts.
If this can be achieved in a simple way - I'm all for it.
I haven't' followed detailed discussions about this, so I cannot make a judgment if there are some downsides to this most straight-forward approach. In my experience, in most cases Dan is right but he does make mistakes and sometimes has a tendency to choose over-complicated solutions.
Without a doubt needs to be done. Every 10k post I see makes me die inside. Practically no post that has had a huge payout has been worth 10k to the community. Left to their own devices, no doubt in part due to not understanding very well where the money is coming from, the users inflate posts past their reasonable value.
Frankly, most of these posts in the top 10 of trending should be getting at most half of what they are. Not just because they don't bring that level of value, but because we know there are many other undiscovered posts that are just as worthy.
The roles could be flipped and the trending topic could be floundering just as likely as that unseen post is. So ideally if they are both equally worthy, they should split the difference of their values, and this determines how high of a payout either of them would get (in this perfect payout situation only of course).
And absolutely we need to "fix", and at least clarify in the meantime, the role of the flag/downvote we currently have, has. Even well-seasoned users disagree on its use. The new users are completely confused.
Great discussion, everyone.
I have thought a lot about reputation systems and I think that downvotes as an adaptive filter is a good way to do this, although some people might complain it creates 'bubbles' - but frankly, if you are not gaining from your interactions in discussions with certain individuals, why should you be forced to download their nonsense to your browser and waste valuable screen real estate on it? Some things are not consensus driven, and filtering unwanted content is an example of this.
This seems perfectly reasonable!
Thanks
Great thinking, @smooth. That sounds like an excellent idea.
Here is my suggestion @smooth
I will be making a post about it
Each post can have a "positive" section and a "negative" section. That means 2 different, distinct comment sections. Depending on the "action" being taking place in each rewards will be divided based on a) followers b) cumulative reputation of those followers and c) individual reputation