Despite best efforts by the DEV team to normalize the act of (flagging or) downvoting content, there's not a lot of people who get a fantastic bellyfeel when it happens to the articles that they painstakingly slaved away at creating. And this especially applies to new HIVE-folk who have not successfully gotten acclimated to getting reward-cucked by people who wouldn't dare to try such a thing in the physical plane out of fear of getting their respective birth certificates canceled.
And I'm only half saying that in jest because, for most people, especially new people, when they see the potential value earmarked to their post, it seems as if it's already there. Thus, the effect of having it removed after they've demonstrated proof of intelligence in the quality of their work has the impact of a molotov cocktail getting smashed through their plateglass storefront window. This type of behavior doesn't help the HIVE community at all, and it's almost universal common knowledge that you can attract more bees with honey than you can with shit.
I see it all the time. Well-meaning and scientific-minded people on the platform are looking at our numbers and watching them rapidly diminish. I read out loud in my head their words as they think to themselves. "We have to do more marketing. We have to get good at marketing. We have to get better at marketing." But you're missing the forest through the trees. The absolute best marketing that marketing can do is providing a product that fits the marketplace like a glove.
If we need to cull some rewards for the greater good of HIVE, there are plenty of creative ways to get 'er done. One good recommendation that I would like to posit is tapping into the crowd's wisdom by conducting a targeted poll of active and diversely staked users who we suspect are unique. We can ask them a couple of questions: "If max rewards per post got capped, what should that number be? 20, 35, 50, 75, 100." Additionally: "Where should reward overages go to better financially serve stakeholders? The DAO, NULL, or both 50/50?
I've spoken in-depth about why the consensus we come to when upvoting and downvoting is inaccurate and doesn't even come close to harnessing the crowd's wisdom as they claimed it did. However, it does not mean we can't tap into the concept more succinctly to better the platform. If we take the sum of the answers given and divide that by the participants questioned, we get a more accurate consensus. There will be outliers accustomed to getting 200-300 hive per post, but we're looking for the average that gets derived from the entire spectrum of HIVE-folk.
Below is an example with 20 answers.
20, 50, 50, 100, 35, 50, 35, 50, 35, 50, 75, 50, 20, 50, 50, 75, 50, 35, 50, 35,
The sum of the above answers is 965 / 20 = a $48.25 reward cap.
Like I hinted at above, the idea of using crowd wisdom to determine a more accurate reward cap will likely insense some stakeholders that are accustomed to raking in a fortune with every post they publish. However, these are just the outliers, amirite? I mean, if it's outliers getting victimized when it's the minnow class getting ganked, then it should be outliers when it's the whale class too, right?
But enough of the class warfare propaganda. If a stakeholder is well-meaning and desires a more valuable token in the future, if they want people to flock to HIVE, then let us stop reward-trolling them with ignoble Molotov downvotes that masquerade as some kind of conservation effort in favor of mother-platform. I mean, tell me this, what good is "mother earth" with no people on it? It's a boring place, one where you'll have to go into outer space and advertise and advertise for intelligent life to come and migrate to your planet.
However, if they are an intelligent species and we have nothing to show for it, save for our mass-culling operations, in that case, I think they're going to take a hard pass on our offer in favor of littering our blue dot with quarantine beacons.
That said, I hope I've successfully poisoned your mind with some of these pro-onboarding, pro-user-retention, anti-downvote, HIVE heresies. If any of these changes were to get made, there would have to be a massive GUI overhaul to reflect the new and less toxic atmosphere; For starters, turning downvotes back into flags for spam, plagiarism, or illegal content would be wise.
Secondarily to the above, discouraging harmful flags can be easy. Anytime a post hits the cap threshold, it's evidence HIVE is either getting burned or sent to the DAO. And this helps to improve either the value of the token or the value of the chain. Thus, in not flagging that, or by upvoting it, this is an upvote in favor of betterment. The reverse is true also. Anytime a quality post gets flagged below the threshold, it takes value away from the token and the chain. Wait, please, save your applause till the end. I'm almost there. Okay, the end.
Thanks for stopping bye!