This last week I made a post which went into some detail about how discussion of the Communities implementation on the Steem blockchain along with some of the underlying assumptions that come along with the design we have led to what is effectively a pretty toxic environment for individuals who care about content – and if we want to get a better environment, if we want to attract content creators and people who want to engage with that content, we have to stop obsessing about the token and start really fixing our gaze on the content.
"You get what you reward" has become a sort of mantra I deploy all the time when I talk about the Steem blockchain because I learned it is a take away from designing games and being involved in online communities from a time before there even was a Web.
I think it's interesting that you have observed the absence of downvoting on other platforms and the negative impact it has on the Steem blockchain. It used to be that integrating downvoting in a public sense was something all designs for social media platforms were aggressive about. They wanted that signaling channel to be very public. YouTube and various music apps (taking into account a subtle difference in the latter which I'll talk about shortly) are probably the last remnant of that design philosophy. Downvotes are a useful signal, in truth. They allow you to communicate to the system that you are not interested in that kind of content or that supplier of content.
Notice how that usefulness is phrased. As a signal between the user and the system, it provides useful feedback for the system to change its behavior in presenting content to the user. Does that signal have any good use for the original content provider? No. From their perspective it doesn't matter if someone dislikes their content, it only matters if someone doesn't like/upvote their content. The signal is not useful to them. Further, the signal is only useful to the system insofar as it changes the behavior of the system as regards to the user. If there is no content presentation filtering, ranking, or other impact – that negative feedback signal is wasted.
Looking at it from a user experience design perspective, the downvote on the Steem blockchain is almost entirely wasted. The platform doesn't change its presentation back to you as a result of that signal, odds are that the signal is really too small to be meaningful in the sense of any reward that you may receive going forward so it's not particularly helpful there, it doesn't help the original content creator it all – it is a signal which is thrown away.
Now, let's consider the one effect that a downvote actually has: it's activates SP to cancel out other activated SP when it comes to the allocation of the reward school. A single vote applies to a single post only as much as the SP can be brought to bear (and for most users that is a tiny, minuscule amount), and the value which is affected goes back into the rewards pool to be allocated to all of the other content in that cycle which received an upvote – which very well may include posts by the same creator.
From a game theoretic perspective, it is always more useful for you to activate your SP and spend it on an upvote, which redirects exactly the same amount of the rewards pool as a downvote, except you directed explicitly and directly to someone whom you believe has provided value to you and gratification. Even in the face of "free downvotes," it is more useful to you to ignore the free downvotes and use your SP/voting power for upvotes on content you would like to see more of. You literally get to choose what that content is and who gets rewarded.
That's a big deal. That's really important.
Now, there is one other of fact that downvotes can have which actually does see a response from the system to that signal and that is "hiding content." But because most of us (and I mean the vast bulk of us) don't have nearly enough SP to make our downvotes useful for hiding spammy content, very little of the actual spam on the platform gets caught in a real sense. That which does has attracted the attention of pools of SP specifically set up for that purpose and largely automated, which is fine. That's what it's there for; individuals can choose to use their resources in that way. For the rest of us? It just doesn't matter.
What does the Steem blockchain desperately need in order to be successful at its primary use, social media networking? Much better discovery tools. Proper community tools. Less obsession with tokens and cryptocultists. More focus on content.
Until those things happen? Nothing else matters. And we've been waiting for any of those things to really happen for several years now. Bit of a shame, I think.
Thank you so much for this valuable comment. I totally agree with all that you said, but I would like to add just one my thought about this:
And especially after reading your last paragraph about waiting several years for something to happen... I'm trying to stay positive about the future of STEEM as a social media network, but after reading your comment and Steemit tryouts to "solve" something, moving the focus here and there, I'm not sure that it will happen, ever...
As I have said before, I think that STEEM will go in the background, and stay the cornerstone of other social networks (tribes, communities) that will be build on it... And that's completely fine from my point of view... Actually, I would like to see it ASAP, because these negative actions on STEEM are poisoning the community and the possible investors to take STEEM into consideration...