Downvote pool

Here are some of my thoughts on a downvote pool combined with 50/50 and the new curve discussed in this post by @vandeberg and of course also after his recent post talking about the downvote pool which seems to have received a lot of pushback from the community.

Even though I've given this a lot of thought and have some really long discussions with Steemians I feel are a big part of this ecosystem and understand it rather well I have to warn you that I may miss some points in this post. It's been quite an eventful week with a lot of discussions, debates and opinions, one thing is certain though, everyone cares about Steem and wants the best for it and what we have right now is clearly not.

First off let's talk about the linear curve. I have often in posts mentioned that even though it's not great for content discovery and the main thing taking the opportunity of it right now are bid bots I always hoped that it would only be the beginning phase and that over time there would be more services, innovations and other usecases for it. Unfortunately not many occurred and the toll has been on content discovery. Many who remained powered up on Steem have either turned to receiving passive ROI through bid bots/distribution bots/small part "SMT's" (such as actifit/steemhunt/etc) while many others have instead decided to vote-trade their way forward leading to closed circles of users rewarding similar content daily, having a guaranteed vote waiting for them thus quality declining much like when an author is on an autovote.
The current curve does not leave a lot of leeway for good curation rewards, as mentioned many have already circumvented that problem by delegating to bots and receiving a bigger piece of the pie than just 25% curation but the results of that are a trending completely filled by authors that buy these votes of these delegators. I'm not saying we should do anything to fix our trending, trending itself may not be under the best parameters right now as though how it calculates a post from being trending which mostly just depends on rewards + age. If we are to focus on content discovery again though and at the same time reward curators or investors who instead of delegating to bid bots would delegate to curation projects and receive about the same ROI or higher this could fix our content discovery and curation.
There are few cases today where curators are able to earn a 100% ROI or higher on their vote value for doing good curation, with 50/50 and the updated and discussed curve this chance would increase a lot more. Of course though bid bots will still exist, maybe not to the extent we see today but there will always be interest of buying attention in an attention economy. While they may exist they will have to adjust quite a bit and at the same time I think many investors will move away from them as their ROI won't be as safe as delegating to a curation project that focuses on rewarding general quality content. With this in mind let's start talking about the downvote pool.

I read quite a bit of comments in the downvote pool post by Hive account@vandeberg and many keep bringing up the "look at how flags downvotes are already pushing away new and existing users, how will this change bring in new users and keep existing ones. This is something quite shortsighted in my opinion because how do we know how many have refrained from giving Steem a try because of the low quality trending, low quality post rewarding and in general bad distribution due to there only being upvotes which has a lot of authors producing lazy content - myself included - since it's so safe for them to do so and they have gotten comfortable with it and downvotes have become this unusual thing which as soon as it happens they get so surprised by it that they go onto the defensive and retaliate or unfollow/mute/etc. At the same time, these few cases of random accounts flagging newcomers or pushing them away are so few that I don't think it's something we need to focus our attention on. It's similar to blockchain tech in general where early on many will abuse it and use it for all the bad ways you can imagine but at the end of the day the benefits, advantages and what it allows you to do will outweigh the cons every time, we just gotta get there.

With about 0.01-0.1% of downvotes compared to upvotes in this day and age it is quite clear that we need them. Reddit has around 10% downvotes and there the upvotes barely even mean anything. Now obviously they can't be compared but a system that allows you to earn from it's pool and investors will clearly need some more downvote activity than we currently have, things have gotten too safe and comfortable and close to Steem just becoming another proof-of-stake chain with "content" only being a placeholder to receive your ROI. I believe downvotes will mostly be used for the bigger reward pool abusers on the chain which don't need to be named as many of us are aware of them already, I'm hoping they will be used well and organized and without bias but I can't promise it will cause a lot of chaos early on - that's the way of open-source tech and innovation and new experiments and that's a good thing. Name other big projects today that do listen to the community, have witnesses who want the best for the economy and of course get rewarded for it and at the same time are so flexible with changing and trying out new things - I don't believe there are many thus this is one of our strengths.

While I understand that authors may fear these changes and may turn to say things such as "we're already earning this little" I am hoping they see the bigger picture. As a manual curator myself I can already tell you that I'll be curating authors a lot more, a 50/50 change will already incentivize me to undelegate from Hive account@ocdb and use it towards curation again and at the same time I won't feel the need to post mediocre/lazy content and instead reward the real authors. I firmly believe that the 50/50 change will quickly cause authors to earn more rewards than what they are doing now. There is so much stake locked up in bid bots and distribution bots (the lesser of evils Hive account@ocdb has 4.3M SP right now) when it could instead be used for curating authors. The more we downvote what we perceive to be low quality content and clearly seeing that it has been bidded up the more we will make good curation even more effective. Remember that when you downvote a post you're at the same time rewarding everything else by that much spread out over all accounts - I know it feels like nothing but if enough of us do it we will quickly see the right kind of content being rewarded.

Having said that I fully expect there to be retaliation of authors comfortable with the way the system works today, especially those who have only been looking to take out as much value from our ecosystem as possible without giving back much. I also expect new secret bid bots to pop up but at the end of the day if we make downvoting & curating great again these authors will at least have to produce quality content they bid on, not what we currently are seeing on top of trending.

Looking forward to discussions about this, as I mentioned above there may be some examples, aspects and simulations I may have missed and would love to be pointed to in the comments so we can continue the discussions there. Right now though I believe these changes will only strengthen our platform and have been long due.