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A few reasons why the downvote pool exists:

  • It's been requested for a very long time by a lot of people. Even before the downvote pool was added, users were already downvoting. Adding a pool was a logical step.
  • Top 20 witnesses already agreed to it in HF21, I don't think they can be persuaded to flip flop on their stance unless there's some major issue with it.
  • It took a lot of coding and man hours to implement it, it would have been a waste of time to remove it all of a sudden?
  • Downvoting is part of a healthy system, it's a measure to deter abusers and express disagreement.

Perhaps you should reconsider how you view the downvote pool and use it. So my answer to remove the downvote pool is no.

Upvoted to restore visibility

Lol. Downvoted.

There is a long and detailed response that I could go into here, and I think that some of your reasoning does come from a desire for growth, but the approach and the result aren't in the best interest for the ecosystem around you... Which includes everyone, down to the group and the culture that you're working hard to build. You can absolutely choose to work and interact here without downvotes on a personal or group level, and I respect that, though I don't know that it will lead to the results that you believe it will. Regardless of how you will vote, our position on this is No. (followbtcnews)

Dear @proxy.token, I would like to revise my stance on removing the downvote pool and I hereby vote in favour of the same. The reason being that BuildTeam has continued to build on STEEM and maintain its services even though the Steem price is low and we are spending the last of our savings to cover our deficits. One of the revenue streams we still have is our daily posts, 1 per day for example this one https://steemit.com/dlease/@dlease/dlease-to-take-on-defi-unveils-new-microservices-backend unfortunately themarkymark and his project buildawhale have taken it upon themselves to downvote our posts and reducing our already low revenue to keep our services such as dlease, steemvoter, ginabot and tokenbb forums infrastructure running.

It bothered me a little, but this recent downvote was kind of the last straw for me, I have been super motivated recently trying to fix the Steem economy with the @sbdpotato project to restore the SBD peg and the proposal to reduce the powerdown period to 4 weeks.

The Dlease post was written by myself and even set 20% to support the @sbdpotato as a form of self tax on our posts, I was really motivated to improve on and market the dlease.io product as a Decentralised Finance (DeFi) alternative on the Steem blockchain, the platform is professional enough to do so. However I found it so discouraging to have had our post that I linked above downvoted from around $45 to $25, a post where I am trying to position a Steem based app against other fintech DeFi offerings. The downvotes on this post left me feeling demotivated and will look really bad to external readers who may not trust the service seeing downvotes of that size, it left me wondering what kind of future BuildTeam can have on Steem and whether there are more tolerant blockchain communities out there.

I wonder how many people we have lost and how much innovation stifled with the negativity of downvotes over the years.

Eh. Politics, politics and again politics :/

I do understand you @thecryptodrive and I hate to see your work being targeted. To counter this unjustified downvote I upvoted you with our project (300k SP). That's the best I can do to show my support.

ps.
check out my comment: https://steemit.com/steem/@crypto.piotr/q555lm
I hope to hear from you.
Yours, Piotr

I've been very outspoken on the problems that downvoting brings to Steem as a global currency (https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/one-currency-to-unite-them-all-71ooesyu) and that it will alienate stakeholders with different perspectives (https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/clash-of-steem).

But I've also been very clear on my stance that a rewards pool can't just have upvotes without downvotes, otherwise, there is no way to combat abusive rewards milking. (https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/on-the-need-of-downvotes-and-their-negative-consequences).

Which is why I'm against your proposal (No), but I'm in favour of moving the current PoB rewards pool towards an SMT. That way, everyone could decide for themselves whether they want to be staked in a rewards pool that allows downvoting or where downvoting is disabled. This also keeps our main currency clean.

Thank you, @therealwolf. I've got your opinion as a witness.

Personally I'm not one to go around downvoting people, I prefer positivity of supporting content. I understand however why downvote pools exist, to curb rampant abuse of rewards pool mining with low-value content. I don't agree that we should do any additional crazy coding modifications in this next hardfork because SMT's are already complex enough and we need to ensure no other latent bugs are introduced by adding/removing too much extra code.

While I don't like downvotes I think we need an alternate solution first, we can't simply just remove downvotes with no other checks and balances in place.

I would actually be in favour of removing both upvotes and downvotes and replacing them with an appraisal system as outlined in https://steemit.com/steem/@raycoms/proposal-change-up-and-downvotes-to-bids; this is quite a nice solution to the negative downvote perception, basically you read a post and cast your valuation on it, say 5 bucks, next person comes along and reckons "nah it’s worth 1 buck" and so on, the post is then valued at the median stakeweighted appraisal.

There are no downvotes and everyone just assigns a value they think is appropriate. Curators also become appraisers.

So in summary, my answer is Yes, I agree to remove both upvotes and downvotes in favour of a stake-weighted appraisal system, but I don't agree to doing it in this next HF as explained above.

Thank you @thecryptodrive. I've got your opinion as a witness.

It is my pleasure, always here when needed.

The appraisal system is nowhere near ready in terms of analysis of game theory and incentives, much less coding, but as you say it could be considered for a future fork. If it can be made to work soundly I'd be open to it.

Awesome, yeah I meant it more of a long-term idea, certainly not for the coming HF. I really like the fact that the appraisal model removes the stigma of downvotes. Recently I watched an episode of a series called The Orville which showed a planet with a social justice dystopia where there are no rules or laws, instead there is mob-law where society decides based on a whim whether someone should be punished and how it can go overboard with mob-downvoting.

This YT video does a good job of summarising the episode called "Majority Rules"

The warp-drive civilisation of earth found this planet's methods of democracy to be crude and unadvanced, which made me think that perhaps Steem is just as crude as it stands now.

I have talked with him about the same idea, removing both upvote and downvote.
https://steemit.com/sct/@jack8831/2e3fqa-2019-11-27#@clayop/q1mxdi

The core question of them, if I understand correctly, is removing downvote being the status quo. So your answer "yes" is considered as "no decision". See my answer with the same goal of yours.

Cool I can't consent to removing downvote on its own but rather replacing it with a different mechanism as we both have discussed above. So as the question stands the answer is no but would be a Yes if there was a substitute mechanism as mentioned above.

Why not just let inflation curb reward abuse! the more abuse, the more token duimping, the lower the price! the market's invisible hand can take care of that! Rewards are just numbers we all need to share and get along and so we crypto first adopters can make money! It's silly fighting among ourselves! We are the ones that deserves it all, all of us! Not them the people that did not take a risk and find this place?? this is a failure, flags are a failure someone break the news to @themarkymark! I'll use them all up as long as i got em, or until the cows come home, I cannot help it! i think the flag button needs to be dismissed. especially for people with 600K sp! Or there should be a rule only whales of similar stature can flag each other, it's not fair!

No

FYI, my personal opinion is remove PoB on Steem and move it to SMT. i.e. no upvote nor downvote on Steem.

Thank you, @clayop. I've got your opinion as a witness.

No.

Thank you, @smooth. I've got your opinion as a witness.

I think the downvote should not be free - as it may be abuse heavily. Take myself for example, I am being downvoted for retaliation recently. 😢

@justyy - a witness who creates https://steemyy.com

Are you guys aware of what happened here for 2+ years with downvotes costing potential curation/post rewards?

If you agree, @proxy.token would vote to you as a partner.

Also this is considered bribing, imo.

I could see how it might appear that way from a certain perspective, but I really can't agree. Stakeholders are entitled to vote for witnesses who support policies the stakeholder also supports.

Yeah, you may be right, this whole post is a bit halfhearted imo and doesn't even bring up all the abuse that can happen with there being no "free" downvotes.

Let's see who will answer yes, lol.

Or who will upvote this very valuable post

Thank god you're back in the top 20!

Congratulations @proxy.token!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade for newcomers in the following category:

  • Comments - Ranked 3 with 19 comments

Do you propose any other way to show disagreement with the payments of a post? I'm not a witness, but I find this interesting

Just stop changing stuff. Give it some time. Everytime you change something it needs to be revalidated by the network and steem is not even validated as it is.

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