These are discussions that have come up often over the years. In my opinion out of Steem, Blurt and Hive, Hive has actually done the better out of the 3 forks in actually finding some sort of balance in this regard.
With every one of these suggestions you are going to inadvertently cause pain to someone who didn't deserve it and even past adjustments to the code have likely done that. There is no system that can't be abused and always the risk of things turning into a full dictatorship when you place more restrictions to try and stop that abuse.
Just as an example, is autovoting bad or is it just how it's used? I both manually and autovote (mainly manually). My autovotes go to authors that I know always write well and often not regularly, but because my time on here is restricted I often miss those posts in their voting window. Yes, I could just comment and vote their response, but it doesn't indicate the value of the post the same way as a direct 'like'. Besides, if the post is still undervalued I have have the opportunity to also add value to their responses. Am I wrong to use autovoting in this way? Even if we remove Hive.voter, people can still programme their own bots; this is how HSBI will work. Indeed projects like this are people responding to what they see as injustices by creating something to counter them, which is a beautiful thing and ultimately the goal of the original creators was to allow this kind of experimentation. Projects like ocd and curangel sprung up to try and address spreading the share of the pool more equally.
A solution to this might be that existing curation services will use their hive power to reduce rewards on posts.
Interestingly curangel were doing this, but stopped due to potential disagreement as to whether a post was over rewarded or not, which was a good call in my opinion after seeing the results of one incident. They now only downvote abuse.
Yes and no. Yes, for instance by downvoting a $100+ blog you are possible going to hurt someone who thinks people dislike the content. But wouldn't this person be happy with if their blog would receive $80?
And the idea to improve the feeds or filter out the highest for people would probably have the same effect. But then without the downvotes that may cause frustration.
I think the way you use it is acceptable. But there are also account with a high stake that don't interact and only gather curation rewards by autovotes. That is milking to me.
And that is the main issue with this I think. Opinions differ on this topic. Rewards and valuation are very subjective.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Yeah, I think you (or was it someone in the comments?) covered the dangers of downvoting someone with more HP than yourself. I feel like Smooth is the only one in the enviable position to do that and not have to deal with the retaliation. I'm just glad he/she has decided to use it fairly benevolently. I know some will still complain at anything being taken off the top line as well, especially if they're used to receiving that level of votes. I've had to explain to a couple of people that Acid's downvotes are not a reflection of their content quality and thankfully they were accepting of the trim he decided they needed in the end.
BTW is good to know blocktrades is looking into the reputation score side of things. It's come up a few times over the years that it could really do with being revised. We have accounts on here who do a lot for the chain and community but rarely post, so their rep score is low, then accounts that are constantly posting mediocre stuff with high rep scores, but they aren't really involved with anything and regularly power down.