Hi everyone,
I posted this similarly around 4 months ago already here: here
I refined the text, considered previous comments, added some additional details and hope we can discuss this now with a focus here on Hive.
People don't seem to get how downvotes work and see them as personal attacks against them or their content or even worse as an attempt of silencing or censoring them. This already divided the steem community and ended up also being one of the reasons why many people stayed behind.
The problem I see is that up and downvotes are not very flexible and express very little.
Post A has a value of 20$
In my subjective opinion I believe this post should not be worth more than 10$
I downvote it to 19$
A whale comes along and downvotes it to 0$
Now I have to go back to the post and remove my downvote since I don't agree that it should be worth 0$
How likely is it that I will come back to a post I downvoted later to check if it turned out a reasonable price I can agree on?
Highly unlikely
Thus, I believe that the way Hive should work should not be by up- and downvoting but by "betting on the value" of content.
And the weight of the bet depends on the quantity of SP the user holds.
Post A is valued 20$ (Let's assume all voters up to now bid the post to 20$)
I bid that the post should be worth 10$
Post goes down to 19$
A whale comes along who wants to bid the post to 0$
He not only has to counter all the 20$ bids now, but also my 10$ bid since the value he considers is below the one I bid for the post.
You might ask now, why this would make any difference, if the whale wants he can still downvote the post to 0$.
That's true, he can, and that's his right, he purchased a ton of Hive and if he believes a post should be worth nothing he can try to use his power to do so.
However, the difference of this system is two fold:
Most importantly, this will change the culture of Steem, people will see that it is an actual betting process on each of the posts. Thus, people won't be mad if someone places a lower bid than what their post is currently paying out. Since these people are just evaluating how much they think the content is worth.
It is much more difficult to game such a system with automatic votes.
Curation could still work similar as it does now, the earlier a user makes their bet and the closer the bet is to the final value after 7 days, the higher the curation payout.
However, I don't think up- and downvotes should be removed from the system.
These should be independent of the rewarding process and could be moved entirely to custom-json operations for example.
Image from Pixabay
