RE: Scalability, Content Quality and Centralization - An open discussion on an incentivized downvote system
@owdy This falls apart because it incentivizes downvoting. Downvoting is taking money from someone without the need to give any explanation.
I've only ever seen @smooth downvote whales like @dantheman and only because every time they post, they suck up 100% of the money in the system cuz everyone wants to be liked by a whale.
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%.
A zero or null vote would be almost the same thing as a downvote. It wouldn't remove money from the system or the poster, but it would put a slight drag on the upward pressure on their future earnings growth for the post.
In otherwords, the UI should just reflect the existing capabilities of the platform instead of trying to make everything a binary or adding yet another incentive that can backfire horribly.
I agree with that second sentence, but I don't think in falls apart. In one case you have a runaway situation, in which more upvotes->more visibility->more upvotes->more visibility->... In the other you have a self-correcting one. If you downvoted a post from the trending page and it were to lose visibility, another one would take its place for people to see and evaluate, instead of always having the same ~8 posts showing.
I like the idea of putting a drag on upvote pressure. And yes, it'd be nice to have a weight scale or stars for our votes, especially for whales to use.
@owdy giving curation rewards for guessing the fair value seems interesting. In away it would be like a prediction market :) I dont see whales votes as a problem as @smooth sees it. Because currently whale votes help to find out what the vision of steem is.
To balance voting itself more even and be more welcome to newcomers I would suggest to give some kind of universal dividend to all people that fully verified their account.
I also like @williambanks idea of having different vote options.
I would suggest to allow 3 different kind of votes:
Important posts could be valued higher lets say 10x your voting power, but should be more limited then normal up-votes, lets say max 30 in the last 30 days.
the same could be done for downvotes.
To the visibility / trending problem, why not use some kind of lottery:
Currently posts are not only rewarded exponentially, but also they get a lot more votes if they become visible on the trending page. Why not draw the posts which are displayed on the main site as default in a lottery like style. Every time you reload the page the displayed posts on the top site could be drawn through a lottery. The more votes they have already the higher the chance to be selected. This would give all participants a fair chance to be listed at the top and therefore attract more votes.
(or in your proposals case downvotes :))
If you want more details about these suggestions, in this post I looked deeper into the topic how we could evolve the voting / payouts, feel welcome to share your thoughts and link similar ideas:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@arcurus/tagging-and-flagging-hidden-by-a-whale-how-to-evolve-further
Exactly!
Yep! There's definitely something that could be done with voting weight. It's already there in the background on Steem, just not on Steemit, so integrating that shouldn't be too difficult.
I agree about your second point, but I don't see it as a real solution to the problem as Steemit scales up. The number of spots on trending is just too limited for that implementation to have a large impact. Even right now, we're talking about 4000 posts/day, there's just no way a lottery system can cycle through enough of those to make a major difference. - What do you think?
a the lottery system from trending topics can scale up perfectly, because the articles are chosen for every user each time he reloads the site. So it can even scale with billions of users and articles :)
@arcurus You're right! I misunderstood the concept, if it's done on an individual basis it could certainly work. I like the idea and, right now, I can't really think of a better way to easily address visibility issues.
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.
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.
How and why does this differ from upvoting based on a subjective opinion?
IMO the adjustable voting power thing isn't that important, even for whales, because the system already adjusts your vote power to how much you vote. Whales might fine tune this a bit, but the incentives favor, overall, using as much of your vote power as possible, which is close to what the system already does.