Downvotes
That image of a thumbs down next to Hive logo is quite simple but reflects a very negative image doesn't it? A visceral feeling of revulsion perhaps. However, this post is not about how downvotes are bad, whales are ruining the Hive or many other bla blas. Downvotes are a useful tool, and it should be the right of any stake holder to downvote any post they want to their heart's content if their voting power allowed them.
That last part is what this is about, the downvote voting pool and why it shouldn't exist and all voting should be tied to one pool.
Stake
We are all told that Hive Power is our stake on the chain. It let's us vote and participate in governance. But is it true? In my opinion, the free downvote pool invalidates other's stake on the chain. If someone can freely invalidate someone's vote without a cost to them, this is certainly an attack on expression of their stake. However small or however big.
If you can adjust a post's rewards freely because you did not agree with how much that post earned, that is an attack on stake of all the people that voted on that post.
But people auto-vote and it is garbage content, it is stolen content yadda yadda. Doesn't matter, those votes came from their stake. If they are not prudent with their votes, it isn't your right to prevent their expression of stake without a cost to you. (Of course, at the moment it is due to how the blockchain works. This is a discourse on why it shouldn't be that way.)
Power
And all this comes to Power in the end. Free downvotes create an asymmetric stake power, a powerful Hive stakeholder can destroy the stake expression of others at no cost to themselves. If you don't see problem with this and how it undermines everything this chain stands for then there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. Powers that be probably would not give up this power. When the downvotes are free, it becomes easier to downvote for "reward amount disagreements" because it doesn't cost anything for the downvoting party, and that is asymmetrical nature of it, how stakes can easily be invalidated.
Thanks for reading. I hope that my view gives you different perspective on downvotes. Personally, I haven't seen anyone discuss this nature of the free downvote pool on chain. How it can become tool of oppression of stake expression in the hands of someone malicious. Basically an attack on stakeholders baked into the chain.
See you in a next post whenever™️
I don't disagree that the number 25% could be lowered since I think it was that high upon implementation facing the bid bot era it attempted to combat, but completely removing it would mean we'd see way more upvote abuse.
There are so many more blind/dumb/auto/malicious upvotes than there are bad downvotes.
PS. thanks for replying to people in the hive subreddit.
This is why we have a discourse and lowering it can be a way to see if we really need it in the first place. From what I see people that are downvoting don't run out of the downvoting mana at all.
As I said in the post, if people want to vote for dumb stuff that is their right as stakeholders isn't it? But if someone can come and change the reward freely at no cost to them, simply because they disagreed on how much reward it get. That action should cost the downvoter as well rather than getting a free pass. Because that is no longer combatting abuse in my opinion.
And you can correct me on this, but people who are combatting such abuse have voting power in spades that they can throw on the issue rather than needing free downvotes to protect their stake. At least nowadays.
Hell maybe the downvote pool rather being a change requiring HF, it can be a parameter that could adjusted by witnesses.
@foxon shared the link in discord and funny enough just that day we helped someone recover their account on Hive Discord. So, I thought I might as well reply.
You are ignoring the fact that this disincentivizes people from doing good downvotes, which already takes a lot of time to find, then may be a headache of many shitty repercussions just for protecting the reward pool. Thus almost no one does good downvoting to begin with let alone a lot of bad ones.
Protecting reward pool argument is no different then protecting the children argument. A good stakeholder/citizen would protect the reward pool/children regardless of incentivization. Because protecting those things is an incentive in on itself.
"I thought this post was overly rewarded, so I gave a downvote." You know this happens, and you know this happens more than the actual good downvotes. Someone should be able to do this, them not being able to this is not my argument. My argument is them being able to do so freely at no cost to them. Because doing so as you know hurts the stakeholders.
Let's imagine a scenario where I have 1M HP and start downvoting posts that have rewards at random. This is more damaging to the chain then any abuse of reward pool can do. It will cause creators to be pushed away, and actively damage the stakeholders. What can you guys do? Counter-upvote to negate the downvote, well it is terrible that it actually costs to do that.
And what if people disagreed with what you say that is abuse? Are they not allowed to disagree? With downvote pool it is evident that they are not allowed to disagree, because suppression of their stake comes at a no cost while if they try to disagree by upvoting you are just gonna remove those votes too for free also.
And what is the reward pool, what is its purpose and what point it becomes an abuse of it? (Ignoring the fact that, the most held HP by the collective deciding what is abuse.)
I can argue that for example, giving votes to buildawhale burn comments is an abuse of the reward pool. Because to my understanding the reward pool's function is to spread Hive stake to other people, not concentrate it. (But as the people that hold most HP in the collective is doing this it is not abuse yadda yadda.)
This is not an attack on anybody don't get me wrong. It is just an example to demonstrate how what is constituting abuse can change from a person to person and downvote pool does not allow people to disagree on what is abuse.
I hope you are getting what I am saying.
Adjusting rewards down on overrewarded posts are good downvotes however, I'm sure you're aware of many "blind stakeholders" who vote things up way too hard. For instance in ocd we have rules in many initiatives where we don't vote posts unless they're at least 12 hours long to prevent these "blind" upvotes to happen to see them in the hot/trending list and overreward them - but others don't place these rules because they wanna be overrewarded - while to some it happens so seldomly that we let it be (it's fine now and then). Good downvotes can also come from certain authors being overrewarded time after time without giving many a reason to justify the rewards, for instance someone who is only a content creator and barely plays the social game, we may not know why they're getting so much rewards, why they're getting upvoted late in some cases even at the cost of the curator, etc, but downvotes may help send some of those rewards back to everyone else so it is distributed more fairly.
In terms of burn comments or hbd.funder ones, one could argue the reward pool is set to always give out a certain amount of stake but since we're not really seeing a wave of new users coming in and in general posts are deemed "overrewarded" by many other stakeholders, it is acceptable to not distribute those author rewards at all and use them for something else that benefit all stakeholders.
For instance I'm spending most of my daily voting power rewarding reddit shares lately as I think bringing traffic to our front-ends is more valuable than just creating content that very few consume.
If/when the time comes that that changes I hope people would join in on curating users again to help distribute stake, but I don't really think it centralises stake, one could argue that a lot of stake is going to authors for barely any effort lately and that this activity itself hasn't really helped bring in new users, not to mention authors who don't even care if it does.
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