We need on-chain strategies for creating STEEM Power demand. One of these strategies has already been rejected by the community over 4 months ago: Vote Negation
The community rejected it because it wasn't explained in such a way that the average user could understand. The community cannot be expected to accept ideas out of left field. But now we have experience and hindsight to help us understand the problems this fixes.
Why Do We Need This?
If you've ever been on the trending page, you've probably seen some of the exact same kinds of posts from the exact same kinds of users, multiple times each day. It has been risky to speak out against this scenario and even doing so had little or no effect.
I must stress that these kinds of trending posts are not the root problem, in and of themselves. The problem is caused by certain voting patterns.
What is Vote Negation?
Simply put, it's a way for one user to temporarily "oppose" another user. The user who wants to do the negation has to tie up their STEEM Power. If they have enough STEEM Power, they can completely negate the other user. Or, if they prefer, they can only negate a certain percentage of the other user's vote.
Side Effect of STEEM Power Demand
Since it takes STEEM Power to perform vote negation, this will have the side-effect of creating additional utility for STEEM Power, which could translate to more demand. If a user decides they want to negate another user, but they still want curation rewards, they'll have to get more STEEM Power.
Likewise, users that finds themselves negated might want to overcome the negation with more STEEM Power, or take a break, which frees up rewards from the curation pool. Both of these scenarios are beneficial to the community.
A Chicken Story
Alice loves chickens. She's also a huge whale. So anytime someone posts about chickens, she upvotes them. In and of itself, this is not a problem, but because she is now the main patron of all chicken posts, many users start to post about chickens. On any given day, there are 3 chicken posts on the trending page.
Bob doesn't care about chickens. He is also a huge whale. Bob decides to oppose chicken posts. His rationale is that the trending page shouldn't have any chicken posts at all, because before Alice started upvoting them, chickens never made it to the trending page.
So Bob decides to negate Alice for a week. He dedicates 25% of his STEEM Power to negate Alice. Since Alice and Bob have approximately equal stake, Bob is just negating a portion of Alice's votes.
Both Alice and Bob now have to make do with only 75% of their STEEM Power, which translates to roughly 75% fewer curation rewards. It's in Alice's best interest to ease up on her chicken fascination a bit.
Over the course of that week, there are indeed fewer trending chicken posts. They're not completely gone, but since the payout is starting to drop, the users look elsewhere for topics to write about. The feedback loop has been broken and things start to settle down.
Is the problem solved for good? Only time will tell. For now, since Bob's negation of Alice expires after one week, he decides to go ahead and let it lapse since he has now seen the trend die out.
If this is the best suggestion you've got for increasing the value of SP, we've got a long way to go. Terrible idea.
Against! In my opinion... It's a Bad Idea. Then it becomes a war of forces not interested in buying Steem power to fight. I'm interested in putting out quality content which is what all content creators should be focused on. You want steem to make it you need more quality content creators that will put out great content.
I see too many short posts that are not really of any value and are thrown together... but most don't do that well so it seems to take care of itself. Quality content creators putting out content will make those poor quality posts obsolete. The market will take care of itself. But to do that content creators have to make enough to justify the effort.
I'm still not sure what this accomplishes besides potentially unwarranted censorship.
Not all of Alice's upvotes are on chicken posts and ALL of her votes will be negatively impacted.
Bob should keep handling it as he has been on an individual basis.
Seems like a feature for whales who want censorship.
@complexring what do you think about this growth hack for Steemit?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@homosapiens/growth-hacking-for-steemit-how-we-can-reach-millions-with-simple-trick
I think it was explained just fine. People thought it was awful because it involved the largest stakeholders being able to not just have a voting power advantage, but the ability to completely take away voting power from those they disagree with.
It would reduce demand for SP -- why would anyone want to buy or hold any if it was subject to being neutered at any time.
I think this being implemented would have a negative effect on demand for Steem Power. Why power up when there's some chance a large staked account could censor and nullify your votes? For those more ideologically inclined towards Steem because of its censorship-prevention ability, why would you sign yourself and your money up under the potential threat of being nullified?
Instead of all of that, why not just change how the trending page is displayed? Maybe a top post or two from each major category?
I like that idea. Let's do both.
Simple solution. And good to.
There is nothing wrong with the current page as a statistical summary of the 'highest unpaid posts by reward'.
It doesn't mean there can't be other views, however, such as the one you mentioned.
Yeah - I don't really care about the trending page. I don't look at it much. But I also don't think it needs to be the landing page for Steemit, either. And if there's a better way to display some of the top content for casual visitors or potential users of the site, I'd be willing to give it a try.
I feel like a vote negation system like this is hard to explain and seems convoluted. I'd simply like to see a down vote option, that most are familiar with due to Youtube. I'd suggest it behave like an up vote but in reverse, with the added parameter that it not influence reputation. A flag should be reserved for plagiarism, harassment, identity theft, spam, etc. A down vote would express disapproval of certain content or it's rewards without disapproving of the content creator.
A standing vote negation order would essentially be like a flagging bot. I think it's unfair to disapprove of content without reviewing it. In the example above, Alice may up vote 85% non chicken articles. I don't want to be set to auto negate post rewards given to quality content. Any kind of negative action should be structured to be inherently manual. Cheetah pouncing relentlessly on plagiarists and identity thieves being an exception I'll grant!
You already have one. You just don't see it because they call it a flag.
I think what would actually happen is Bob negates Alice, and she chills. And Bob removes the negation before the week is up.
Whereas, a downvote/flag scenario will perhaps cause a chill, Alice might just switch to a different time of day to do her curation, hoping Bob is asleep (and hoping he doesn't go as far as to set up a downvote/flag bot).
Posts are open for voting for at least 24 hours so that won't work.
Voting bots are readily available such as the steemvoter service, and others can be created.
To me this strikes me as a solution in search of a problem, and one that potentially causes all sorts of conflicts and perception problems that may well exceed its utility.
If negative autovoting bots became widespread then it could be seen as an optimization. But it isn't even clear whether a simplistic "negative vote every vote by this user" would express the desires of voters anyway. What about "negative vote every vote by this user, except these sorts of posts, where I agree with the upvotes". Or negative voting only on downvotes (or only certain ones) but not upvotes. All of these and more can easily be expressed with scripts/bots, but not with a direct negative vote. And in all cases, this equally incentivizes buying more SP in order to increase influence.
It is just not clear to me that a blanket negative vote is a use case that would actually have significant use, and if not then it is more trouble then it is worth.
Another consideration is, would this vote negation even have any noticeable effect, or would it just add overall negativity to the platform!
For a simplified example, lets say that Bob and Alice are the only two voting, and as described they have roughly equal stake. Alice votes on chickens and Bob votes on what he deems worthy. The rewards pool will be split 50/50 between the two topics. Now if Bob sacrifices some of his power to block Alice... it's a wash. He cuts her power by 50%, cutting his own by 50% in the process. Now when they vote again the next day... the pool is still split 50/50.
I don't see how vote negation does anything more than the simple strategy of voting on what you like... and not voting on what you don't.
As far as I'm concerned there aren't nearly enough chicken post here. This however is a fine example of a chicken picture...
Curious, can't Bob technically achieve this today by downvoting (flagging) all of Alice's chicken posts?
Correct.
Any dictatorship is strangling this beautiful project called STEEmit
Great post upvote and follow you.
Gran post te voto y te sigo.
Follow me please:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@germanaure/hello-steemians-introduceyourself
https://steemit.com/tour/@talha/tour-to-muree
upvote and follw me
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