Are you suggesting we do away with downvotes?
If we adopt the blurt model of dealing with abuse, I'll announce my departure from this platform.
This does not require a hardforking solution.
I like hivewatchers and more funding to them, but the black lists, and perhaps some more tools are good enough.
Nope, not at all. I do believe we need the downvote button for any account to be able to use without agreements with others.
But I think we could do with the possibility to remove an account, or block it completely. It shall be used with great care since I do not want HIVE to be seen as or become a platform of censoring, but some accounts just needs to be blocked indefinitely and some other temporarily. A multi dimensional governance model could handle such function. Shall it be based on 20 accounts to nuke an account? Maybe not, maybe it shall be based on 100 accounts, I don't know.
We can think of using this multi dimensional consensus model for other things as well. Maybe we get another layer of witnesses to oversee the activities of the chain witnesses and give their value to each individual witness based on a defined set of parameters? This will help the community, all those who don't know anything about witnesses, to determine whom they will give their votes. Kinda like the parliament and senate in political systems. If need be, we create a third layer, and forth. I don't know.
I just got inspired by this extra dimension of governance used by BLURT while I'm also thinking of all the issues we see with abuse in general and the amount of users that never change their witness votes and even when they want to change, they have hard times to determine who to give their vote to.
We are still a small community, but what if we are 100 times larger? We need mechanism more than we have today to make sure we 1) grow 2) will not get out of control. Multi dimensional consensus based governance could help these to aspects and make everything more decentralised and 'democratic' in a practical sense.
I have no solution myself yet, I just see opportunities. I truly believe we shall start debating the fact we could do something with re-using the consensus system we have for our base layer, to implement a multi dimensional governance system instead of the (more or less) single dimension we have around our chain.
Note that 1) I do like Hivewatchers as well and trust these guys 2) Hivewatchers is a centralised team, therefore not following the ideals and rules of decentralisation. Do we like to keep it like this for the long term? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we need more Hivewatchers teams working independently? Maybe we implement a governance system that can nuke Hivewatchers and simiar accounts/teams when they become abusive? Maybe we shall implement a governance system for all those who feel they are falsely accused by Hivewatchers and leave the final judgement to such decentralised governance system rather then to a central team? Even the blacklists are centralised implementations at the moment. Maybe the governance system shall drive and decide for who gets onto the blacklist?
Well, I'm glad we see eye to eye on keeping downvotes. I don't really like to think about changes in how content censorship should work with those off the table which is why I don't like Blurt.
However, I do see value in having a system that can more easily remove extreme content. I'm not a fundamentalist libertarian either and obviously, some content is completely unwanted here. This level of censorship would require a hard fork to implement.
You are right that there is no real safe way to give anyone the keys to that. One safe way could be to keep a list of stuff that is to be permanently removed and do away with it every hard fork (give them 30 days minimum to appeal). The list could be made public and a voting system could be in place with people being able to delegate their vote. I would still recommend some control over the list. For example certain nomination requirements and certain people with authority to manage it.
I think giving people 30 days to appeal would buy them time if they are falsely accused by hive watchers. It will give plenty of time to save the content to republish if they clear their name after.
Another problem I've always thought about is when the abusers get away with months of abuse before getting caught. There is no whitelist to start publishing and the cost to create a new account is at most a couple of dollars which can easily be recovered in a single post.
Perhaps a way to verify new users would be great, as well as a trust score. This could all be done via 3rd party and completely optional. It would be of great use to the larger curators who actually care about the content they vote for. The way I envision this is we vote for a 3rd party side account for new users until they are verified and trusted. I think anyone serious about producing content could wait a couple of weeks until the rewards are handed over and then trust is established.
Too many people are milking the system. They are hard to deal with. The corruption wasn't fixed with Hive. There doesn't seem to be much motivation or enthusiasm to clean it up. The price of Hive and overall market cap isn't as good as it ought to be.