RE: The Flag, The Down Vote... my semi-frequent update to this idea... hopefully those in favor of the downvote read it
upvoted for the discussion, but i disagree with your position vehemently.
Yeah, downvoting is important to stop people form gaming the system, but thats beside the point.
The point of downvoting is that we're alocating a fixed reward pool, and, especially in a system that uses quadratic vote weighting and has many big players, there have to be mechanisms to address a percieved shortfall in the allocated rewards (the post made too little, so im upvoting it) and an equally efficient mechanism to address a percieved excess in allocated rewards....
A system of upvotes will tend to "clump" rewards -- that is to say create an environment where a very few get a huge portion of the reward pool while most get nothing or almost nothing... were not great now in this regard, but it will only get worse as time goes on and whales entrench behind known writers.
I wrote a post about this recently, and why the downvote works objectively better than the upvote for this purpose... you can check it in my blog if youre interested.
The problem with the flag is that perceptions of what 'flags' are, has already been ingrained in peoples internet language. It would seem to me that putting a downvote button next to the upvote button takes away the 'flagging' idea and then it would be similar to a reddit style voting system (which is a language that people are quite familiar with). If the frontend stopped making the voter identifications public, that would avoid people impulsively going on a revenge spree. I'm assuming there are issues with this because of the blockchain being publically accessible, but at least make people work to find out who downvotes them. I'm sure some third party website would jump at the opportunity to provide that service.
thats the way it originally was (a reddit style down chevron). The "flag" exists in the UI only. The idea was to discourage people from using it arbitrarily, but it had the unintended effect of of causing far more buthurtedness.
The voter identifications aren't the problem (and yeah, its easy to see it on the blockchain)
The problem is that if the aggregate total of votes is displayed, it doesnt draw everyones attention to it.
100 upvotes and 1 downvote just shows as 99 total votes. But with the big red flag easily identifiable on the side, it shows as 100 upvotes and some guy telling you to fuck yourself.
What is the obstacle to changing it back?
i think its one part inertia, one part people being concerned that it will encourage downvoting
I changed my position some... there was a follow up post I made at the request of @dantheman after discussion and reading the post by @bitcoindoom.