I do love a good experiment but the negative consequences to downvotes has been discussed & argued ad nauseum. That being said, I'm not one to say this is good or bad but there are a few things I'd like to know:
- how long will this experiment last?
- which whales agreed to withhold upvoting?
- which whales are assigned to downvoting (in case a whale didn't get the memo or decided to ignore the experiment).
- Was the community at large informed prior to the experiment?
The last question is more important to me because honestly, I would volunteer for this experiment. I'll take a couple of flags for the sake of seeing how the payouts are affected -- but I would also allow content contributors the option of taking a day off from posting and seeing how our upvotes affect newbies. The key is ASKING for volunteers. I can't be the only one who'd raise my hand for a flag.
Hi @merej99 - great questions! I'd like to know a lot of the same things. I did create this post with what I do know about the experiment. Hopefully it should at least clarify some of it :)
https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/the-whale-voting-experiment-explained-including-downvotes-from-abit
Thanks, @timcliff - I'm going to check it out right now.
I've noticed a few more accounts doing mass downvotes on posts and comments now. Kind of makes me wonder what's in the kool-aid today.
My 2 posts of the day have all been mass flagged too :)
The whales that are participating in the experiment are trying to cancel out the votes of the whales that are not participating. Unless all of the whales abstain from voting (or are canceled out) then the experiment doesn't work.
Even the Nazis were doing experiments without saying anything to their guinea pigs ..