The proposal to establish a system on Steem where accounts have a certain amount of downvotes available to them that do not consume voting mana is one we find highly interesting and appropriate as a way of incentivizing negative curation (downvoting) at the protocol level. The present deincentivation of negative curation (via its lack of rewards and its consumption of voting mana) is one of the major factors that result in the marginal number of downvotes issued overall and also one of the reasons for the rampant state of abuse by fraudsters/plagiarists/spammers/scammers/farmers/you-name-it. The fact that there is no incentive to negative curation embedded in the protocol, and that there is a disincentive in it, makes it all but certain that a substantial amount of negative curation won’t take place.

Our Proposal

While taking the disincentive out of the equation is a crucial and fundamental step, there is another additional modification that is needed to make negative curation work in practice.

Two factors are involved in the need for this modification:

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1) Downvote Retaliation:

Even more powerful of a factor working against negative curation than the consumption of voting mana, is the risk of retaliatory flags, users downvoting back the users downvoting them as a deterrence tactic.
This retaliatory downvoting is made way more likely to happen if a certain amount of downvotes don't consume mana.

2) Abuse Discovery Information Propagation:

Negative curation of abuse such as plagiarism/ID theft/etc. mostly depends on the work antiabuse initiatives, regular users don’t check posts for plagiarism or dont investigate posts deeply enough so as to effectively find these types of abuse. Hence, even if the disincentive is eliminated and users gain the power to downvote a certain amount of posts without spending voting mana, there remains a logistic problem regarding translating the abuse discovery into actual downvotes of that abuse, since every time an antiabuse initiative finds, say, a plagiarized post, that initiative would have to communicate that information to users. This is a bottleneck since it requires the time and attention of users, generating a logistic/communicational burden that is hard to overcome.

Both these issues can be solved by the solution we propose.

Enter Downvote by Proxy / Downvote Delegation

Just like users can vote for witnesses by proxy -delegating the choice to a party that they consider better informed than them to make the witness selection- and just like users can delegate SP -as for example so that the delegatee performs positive/negative curation for them- there is the need for the proposed downvote power to be able to be delegated.

In this way, the vast majority of users that do not engage in abuse discovery/detection can delegate their downvote power to antiabuse initiatives such as @steemcleaners @steemflagrewards or @jaguar.force who actively dedicate themselves to detect and engage abuse. This approach solves the abuse discovery translation into downvotes of the posts since the downvote power is now in the hands of the delegatee, so the communicational burden is overcome.

Additionally, this approach largely solves the retaliatory downvotes issue, since:

1. The downvote decision is not made personally by the user.
   and
2. Given that the downvote power is delegated to a third party who is likely to have many more of such delegations, it is unlikely that the downvoted party will go look who delegates their downvote power to the downvoting account and proceed to downvote the large amount of accounts that would be delegating to those antiabuse initiatives.

In short, this allows negative curation to take place in an effective and efficient manner while reducing the risk of reflexive/retaliatory downvoting and the occurrence of downvoting positive feedback loops or downvoting vicious circles aka “flag wars”.

There is one more idea we would like you to consider, and we will be brief so please bear with us for a few more paragraphs.

Our Second Proposal

Let's consider the case in which a user makes a plagiarized post and then that post is detected by an antiabuse initiative or regular user when it already has substantial rewards. And let's assume we all agree that a plagiarized post deserves $0 rewards and that the accounts upvoting the detected plagiarized post deserve $0 curation rewards.
There is 3 solutions that accomplish the rectification of the situation.

1. Voting parties unvote the post to $0
2. Other parties downvote the post to $0
3. A combination of 1 and 2.

It is important to note that in this context an unvote equals a downvote regarding the diminishing of the plagiarized post rewards.

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Oracle Assisted Unvote/Downvote Rewards + Curation Rewards Freeze & Switch

When a plagiarism detection oracle -that could be for example @SteemCleaners - determines that a post is plagiarized, curation rewards would switch from those upvoting the post to those unvoting or downvoting the post. In this manner the parties that upvoted the plagiarized post are incentivized to unvote it and other accounts are incentivized to downvote it, by being curation rewards corresponding to the peak value of the post distributed, stake-wise, to those that unvote it or downvote it until the post is at $0.

The plagiarism detection oracle(s) could also be voted upon by the community just like witnesses are so that the decision of who qualifies as an oracle is decentralized.

In this context, were the upvoters not to unvote the post, they would gain no curation rewards. Additionally this system allows for plagiarism discovery to have a certain amount of the curation rewards to be issued to the detecting party as a sort of bounty reward for discovering the plagiarism, for example if the unvoting/downvoting parties then pass forward a part of the curation rewards to the party that detected it.

A tertiary effect of this system is that the downvoting of severe abuse as plagiarism/id theft/scams/etc would be prioritized by independently downvoting accounts over disagreement of rewards downvotes, since the former would yield curation rewards while the latter would only result in the diminishing of the rewards.

It would also incentivize the celerity of response of independently unvoting/downvoting accounts since the curation rewards would only be shared stakewise with those that unvote or downvote it before it reaches $0.

In summary, the freeze and switch of the curation rewards of demonstrably plagiarized posts would incentivize the unvoting and downvoting of such posts by recognizing at the protocol level that in the same way that content discovery and upvoting is curation and adds value to the platform, abuse discovery and unvoting/downvoting is also curation and adds value to the platform as well.

This is Jaguar Force,
Reporting directly from the Jungle
Onwards!