RE: Who Needs Steemit Etiquette? - Steem Smart Podcast Ep. 11a
Flagging to reduce payout is a bad thing
I don't do it myself but it's part of the design of the system, therefore I don't see the problem with it. And there definitely is a reason to do it: because you freaking feel like it! (Same as with upvotes.) Steem is about subjective proof of work. The whole idea is that it's subjective. Each person uses it as they see fit.
Where does that incentive go if people can take the power of my steem power away?
It's still there. It's simply balanced by something else.
Yet when a post is down voted how does that then become paid to other people?
You answered it yourself. Decrease one post's percentage of the pot and the difference is redistributed. It's very small but based on my understanding it's a fact.
I know a half dozen people that I wanted to come to steemit.com and they won't come due to this one reason.
They'll refuse free money and the chance to earn more because someone might downvote them? These delicate flowers need to man up.
This being in beta I do see it as a flaw we can address.
Downvotes/flags are a feature, not a bug. People need to read some Eckhart Tolle, watch some Alan Watts videos and put their delicate egos in their proper places.
Thanks for the comment!
Appeal to Authority doesn't prove anything. I can read Eckhart Tolle, and I can watch Alan Watts. They are people like you and I. They are not gods. I can choose to agree or not agree with their solutions. They may indeed work, and they may indeed for the most part be great. I haven't seen any human creation without flaw. I don't really like treating the words of anyone like dogma, even if they come from someone I believe is a wise person.
I don't approach this issue from an EGO point of view. I have not had a flagging happen to me. I've seen it happen to others. I've seen it abused, I've seen it lead to retaliation, and seen a dog pile effect and we haven't even had most of the world join us yet.
Right now it'd be theoretically possible for a wealthy person to purchase a lot of steem, power up, and decide they wanted to down vote everything I write, or every steemsmart podcast, or every post by George Donnelly. They could do this without reading it. It is rather idealistic to think this will not happen as it already happens at places like reddit.
In addition, if we are planning on mainstream adoption of steem do you think people are going to give a damn about Eckhart Tolle initially? I seriously doubt it. I do believe we could educate people over the long term.
As to the whitepaper, I've read it several times. Things adapt, things change, and we learn from our trials.
The fact that people feel the need to down vote someone due to disagreement, or because they subjectively believe it has too high of a potential payout is far more of an EGO centric thing than what I am proposing. Up vote only removes the possibility of you deciding you think everything I write is subjectively worth $0.00 and you having the power to enforce that.
If it did not impact reputation and finances and instead was just a NUMBER of down votes then that could feed the egos of people that feel they need to down vote others.
We hit the nesting limit elsewhere:
How do you know it doesn't work? As far as I know it hasn't been tried. In addition, up vote only does not stop you from NOT supporting something. You simply don't vote. It does prevent you from deciding that you don't like me, or value something so you can now strip the value other people perceived it had.
However, let's go to this idea that due to a fixed amount when we remove that value it is returned to the pool and redistributed. As far as I can tell it is not redistributed based upon votes, but instead would be dumped into the pool that is distributed to people across the board via steem power. So we could simply remove voting at all and everyone would get paid based upon their steem power. I don't see that as offering much incentive so I don't endorse that and I am certain you wouldn't either. Yet that is me taking it to an extreme of everyone cancelling out each others vote.
Please consider this hypothetical scenario.
Someone (neither you or I) writes a rather brilliant article on some philosophical study and they put a lot of work into it. Some people value that effort and vote it up to $10.00. You come along and have accumulated power and the study contradicts your personal belief so you vote it down to $0.00.
Now the people that value it have had you cancel out their investment in steem. You also will have crushed that other person's work due to you seeing it as having no value due to a dogmatic or personal preference.
I recall the instance with @dollarvigilante and you likely do as well where his post about tips for people using steem was voted down to about 10%. While I personally think that celebrities are a bit overpaid for some of their posts, other people do not agree with me. In that particular case the reason it was down voted to 10% it's original value was because there were too many similar articles already posted before.
Due to discoverability dollarvigilante was new here, and it is not like it is easy to find such posts. So that post obviously had value to some people. I do think a large amount of the value of the post was actually due to the celebrity nature of the dollarvigilante, yet that was not the reason given.
Should people need to justify their actions? Currently if it stays as it is no. You should be able to go down vote nuts if you want to. Yet there will be consequences and it will cause war. It is pretty much guaranteed to happen and there is plenty of precedence to back that up.
So I am NOT 100% certain up votes only would fix the problem. It hasn't been tried. Yet I am rather fond of experiments. I am also not one of those that if it is tried I'll doggedly demand we keep doing it. This is not about me being right or wrong. It is simply perceiving what is interpreted as hostile actions by many people (read the posts, and the topic comes up a lot) and I actually do tend to adhere to the NAP as much as possible. I also have a strong sense of justice so if I perceive people being attacked I like to be the hero sometimes stupidly so. So from an EGO perspective... that actually is an ego problem I have. ;)