Steem is about allocating funds to those who bring value. To be able to do that, we need a way to express our will to both increase and decrease the payment for a post or comment.
Having only a downvote flag leaves a big gap in terms of user experience: there is no way to decrease a payment when there is nothing wrong with a given post but you just feel that it has received a bigger payout than it deserves and you want those funds to be allocated elsewhere.
Thus Steem should offer two ways of performing a downvote:
- a payment downvote: to be used when you feel that a given post (or comment) has received a bigger payout than it deserves
- a spam/abuse downvote: to be used for flagging (and unflagging) spam and abuse (as the downvote flag is meant to be used now)
As we have it now, almost all trending posts are flagged, suggesting that all those posts are spam or abuse. Also, there is no way to outvote those flags - any troll can just go trough all posts and flag them, thus making the spam/abuse indicator completely useless.
If you don't think that a post is valuable (in your subjective opinion) then don't vote for it.
But to override the votes of those who (in their subjective opinions) think that the post is valuable or valuable to them? That goes a little too far in my opinion.
In my view, the primary purpose of curation is to attach a price tag to a post . A payment downvote would be a tool for achieving this goal - finding the right price.
I agree that a payment downvote results in more accurate content curation.
What you're describing is the exact functionality of the flag. It was right next to the upvote until a few days ago, and was just an upvote turned upside-down. If you want, just use the flag... there's literally no difference between what you're suggesting and the flag.
I think it's a very bad idea to make people use the same tool for two very different goals. This violates one of the fundamental principles of UX design.
It's really the same goal. You want to limit the reward the author gets and decrease the post's visibility. You might ha e different reasons for wanting to do the same thing, but it would be redundant to have two buttons for the same action.
I disagree. If you downvote my post using the flag I don't know if you've found my post offensive or you just think it's not worth the money. The feedback loop is incomplete and can be misleading.
Also, please note that currently almost all trending posts are flagged, which makes the spam / abuse indicator quite useless.
"If you downvote my post using the flag I don't know if you've found my post offensive or you just think it's not worth the money. The feedback loop is incomplete and can be misleading."
I agree
Similarly, we could also think about rewarding those who downvote content for a valid reason (spam, plagiarism, etc.). Curation goes both ways as there is good and bad content.
I think there is already a way to be rewarded for a justified downvote - you can state your reason for the downvote in a comment below the post and then earn a reward when your comment gets upvoted.
^ This. Let everyone speak their mind, and if people like it enough to upvote it, then so be it. But you are also free to leave your opinion below it, and if people like that enough to upvote it, so be it.
I think a downvote payment option would create a 'crabs in a bucket' mentality. Where people downvote posts to increase the share of their own content or content they like.
If users feel a post is receiving a bigger payout than it deserves they should simply abstain from upvoting it.
There is an element of luck and timing that accounts for some of the large payouts on supposedly 'less deserving' posts. This randomness, whilst it may irk some, it will let others know that they could possibly benefit from this unpredictability.
However in the long run, consistently providing quality content should yield consistent rewards, and people should not be overly concerned about the occasional post that wins the Steemit lottery.
I think 'crabs in a bucket' mentality is not bad when we have limited funds to distribute. Also, if you start abusing this feature your reputation takes a hit.
I just think we should not try to prevent certain behaviors by not providing tools for them. Instead, we should offer all options and let the users decide what is best for Steem. If we artificially limit the options, we put ourselves in the "we-know-better" position.
And there are people what clearly need this option, e.g. @smooth , as expressed here.
I kind of agree. But it would be subject to greater abuse, perhaps being more trouble than it's worth. When whales come upon a post that is worth enough already, they simply should not vote for it.
I understand but what we have now is even worse: people are misusing the spam/abuse flag. They are either trolls (which should be outvoted but there is no way to do it) or genuine users who misuse the flag because they have no other option to express their intent.
I suggested negative rewards for those abusing flags here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@djleo/proposal-drastically-improve-steemit-quality-control-with-incentives#@coinhoarder/re-djleo-proposal-drastically-improve-steemit-quality-control-with-incentives-20160711t033922015z
Perhaps it will make people more apprehensive about abusing flags?
That's the functionality of the flag already, you'd need more steempower to have a noticible impact though.
These two posts:
erotic-story-of-a-first-threesome
dao-hacker-wanted-to-destroy-ethereum-ecosystem
are both flagged with 2 down-votes.
The first one is an obvious plagiarism and an attempt to cheat the system, the other one is original content which some people found to be overpaid - yet they are flagged the same. Isn't this confusing? Isn't this discouraging for the author of the original content to be treated as if s/he was cheating? How will more steempower help with that?
"which some found to be overpaid"?
I'm the author of the second one. Yes it is very discouraging, particularly since I wrote something that is controversial and I can only assume that I was downvoted by people who don't like my opinion.
The only silver lining is that the people that downvoted me don't seem to have much SP since I didn't lose much.
By my thinking, the purpose of upvoting and downvoting is for voting whether or not content
is valuable or not valuable.
The subjective interpretation of "what it should be worth" in dollar terms is vindictive and toxic.
If we're doing that, I would prefer that the dollar amount be hidden from the UI.
One of the problems in trying to objectively determine how much is too much, is that people come from different backgrounds. Meaning that a citizen of country X could be making 100$ a day and a citizen of country Z might be making 10$ a day. Now for the second one, most posts in the front page of "trending" or "hot" might be "excessive". So you have a real problem when subjectivity of one's own life condition clashes with what one wants to be an objective rating.
I like your ideas to have two different types down votes.
I agree that having a payment down vote "to be used when you feel that a given post (or comment) has received a bigger payout than it deserves" will result in more accurate curation.
It also makes sense that there should be a separate spam/abuse flagging/down vote as well.
Separating the two eliminates confusion as to the reason for the down vote.
I think your idea, and @djleo's idea could be combined. He suggested that we gamify downvoting: https://steemit.com/steemit/@djleo/proposal-drastically-improve-steemit-quality-control-with-incentives