@owdy This falls apart because it incentivizes downvoting. Downvoting is taking money from someone without the need to give any explanation.

I mostly agree. I don't personally see a way to incentivize legitimate (anti-spam/scam) downvotes that wouldn't lead to more abuse angles. I'd like to hear a solution that does however, so I wouldn't discourage someone from thinking about it. I disagree with incentivizing subjective value-reduction downvotes though. If someone downvotes based on a subjective opinion on a post's value, it should cost them voting power and not give them anything back.

The far simpler solution would be to cause a popup to occur when upvoting which presents a series of stars. 5 stars causes you to vote with 100% power, 0 stars causes you to cast a 0% vote. Each star is 20%.

People with higher amounts of SP have been asking for an easy UI on Steemit for controlling vote power. Even though the majority of users don't need this, the whale accounts have enough stake that it's still an important thing. I would not like to see a two-step process to vote everywhere however, especially not for all accounts. Some kind of toggleable option tucked away to enable some kind of tiered % voting might be ideal for whales and casual users alike.