I have long pointed out that curation rewards derange curation, substituting pecuniary interest for interest in other qualities of content. For that substantial part of the community in which financial interest is their primary concern in almost every facet of their lives, the various metrics which govern curation rewards are the reason for their votes, and these metrics are largely unrelated to any other quality of the content. It has always been the case that Trending is garbage, and this financial incentive to upvote posts is most of why Trending is garbage.
Anonymity would not completely fix the problem, because various metrics that increase curation rewards for particular posts would apply regardless of the authorship, although some of the most profitable reasons for financialization of curation would be eliminated, such as circle jerks. Elimination of circle jerks is extremely desirable from my perspective, which is entirely focused on the values content can have besides being a source of income for authors, publishers, and boosters. I consider society incomparably more valuable than money, and have often quoted Mike Tyson to illustrate that far greater value. He said Don King, the boxing promoter, would sell his mother for a dollar, and this is a point regarding curation rewards on Hive because it is the same principle behind the upvotes of users that only consider curation rewards when upvoting content.
It is quite possible to produce such anonymity on Hive while enabling rewards. An NFT token would be created for each post, and all upvotes would attach to the token, which would only be available to the account that authored the post. While the account could eventually be identified when the rewards were extracted from that NFT, there are a few ways anonymity could be maintained, the most obvious anonymization of wallets, which would substantially change Hive (I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. It would decrease the incentives for having multiple accounts per user, for example).
No HF would be necessary if this was undertaken via layer 2 (except for the wallet anonymity). RC's make downvotes almost unnecessary today, because they make spam expensive, which is all downvotes do. Downvotes are not equivalent of saying no in a debate, BTW. In normal elections no votes are unnecessary, as failing to say yes is a no. Adding downvotes is like adding an option to recommend candidates in an election be prosecuted for corruption, or instead of merely voting to fund a political proposal measure or not, to fine those that propose it. Downvotes do not merely fail to increase reputation, as not upvoting does, but actually decrease it, enabling posts from accounts with negative reputation to be 'greyed out'.
Curation rewards are completely unnecessary to promote content quality, actually opposing curation for content quality by providing financialization as a reason for curation. Downvotes further derange curation by specifically being a mechanism for censorship, and literally have no other curative purpose. Anonymity is a poor mechanism to reduce the derangement of curation curation rewards effect, improving things but little. Anonymity does provide other benefits, however, that are separately desirable from financial considerations by preventing censorship through other means than downvotes. Since NFTs could be used on a second layer to make anonymity quite practical, the benefits and harms of anonymity could be usefully considered on their merits alone. Given the rise of censorship today, and the existential danger it poses to everyone (censorship clearly prevents danger from being signalled, leaving potential victims of dangerous things unable to prevent themselves from being harmed) enabling catastrophic harm.
Despite obvious drawbacks, eventually anonymity may be the only means of preventing such catastrophic harm. That is certainly something Hive should consider.
Thanks!
Thank you very much for your detailed comment. I agree, the reward system has no incentive to vote for quality posts. To maximize curation gains you have to take into account things other than quality. To vote quality posts, then, you have to put at least two things at stake: part of the earnings and time to read the posts (the good and not so good ones) and choose which ones, from a personal point of view, will be voted. Less earnings and more time is a lousy deal for those who value money above everything else. I don't think anonymous publishing is a solution for that, but it could help in some cases like the ones you mention, and as I tried to show in the post it has an intrinsic value, sometimes overlooked in societies where there is a more or less wide freedom of speech. Tokenizing each post is an interesting idea and I saw that there are some platforms that are already doing it. I admit that I had not thought of that, I will study it more carefully. Greetings and thanks again!