You cannot expect people to act against their own financial interests and be altruistic, it's an unrealistic expectation.
Is it really altruistic to do something in the hope of a raising STEEM value?
I would accept not to earn one single more STEEM in case this guaranteed a significantly higher STEEM price.
In other words: I would accept to get a smaller piece of the cake, if that made the cake grow a lot. :)
I just wonder if people (and also many whales) really know what their interests are? They circle jerk, upvote themselves, use bidbotes to reach a certain ROI. They actually get that great ROI, but in the meantime the STEEM price is getting lower and lower. So in my eyes they were thinking to maximize their profits but did exactly the opposite ...
Price of BTC has a bigger impact on Steem price than anything at this point in time.
So, the logical path in the current setup is to hoard as much as you can. Even if Steem only hits $7 when BTC reaches another ATH, that's 20x returns.
If I were a whale who is not confident about Steem's future, that is exactly what I would do: piling tokens. Shitcoin can still moon every now and then.
Hell, if I just sell 1000 Steem when the price reaches $1-2, I would profit.
The free 25% flags will hopefully drop some hammer on the bs on trending and massive self-voters. I'm pretty sure the whales will war with themselves first.
According to the stats I'm informed of: most people don't downvote.
https://steempeak.com/@lalala
You literally only have a handful of people downvoting more than the few times shown on the chart and most of those names are from anti-abuse initiatives of some sort. Or, they are people being flagged by the said groups putting out their retaliation flags.
Most whales seldom downvotes, they are more interested in stacking coins.
Right, but nevertheless other altcoins, whose prices also denpend on the price of BTC, overtook STEEM, which is only ranked 60th at CoinMarketCap nowadays.
They just don't dare to downvote, even if in future downvotes will be theoretically free. The threat of retaliation is too strong.
Look at the comments under this article for example: a whale upvoted his own comment to the top and flagged another comment which actually got way more upvotes. Even if downvoting would bring some curation rewards and even if they don't like his behavior, I doubt that people would flag the whale comment ...
Doesn't matter. Profit is profit. If you think most people are here for the ideals, you are sadly mistaken. The reason why downvoting is so painful on this platform is because everyone views that Steem token as potentially the ticket to massive gains.
Then again, there's also psychology. People complain about being downvoted by tiny votes from @camillesteemer and their hundreds of alts that literally amount to nothing.
That, and also the unrealistic mindset that this is the place to supplement their income. It can be, but it's impossible to be that way for everyone. People like @baah are on the rare side of the spectrum where "Que Será, Será" is the mantra when it comes to rewards. Ideally, only serious content creators and large stakeholders should care about the rewards.
Because @transisto has been one of the most vocal large stakeholders about this issue. The "more votes" you see simply come from people looking to counter his downvote.
It's hard to make a judgement call on the proposal when I do see the positive and negative side of things, but I do know that status quo is not good.
There is no profit, if the STEEM price always decreases, which it does since a long time. There is especially no profit for big stakeholders.
It doesn't matter to get a bigger piece of a cake, if the cake is getting smaller and smaller.
And I see no reason why smaller accounts shouldn't be here to earn something, even if of course there is no 'right' to earn.
You do realize that a number of big accounts didn't buy their stakes, right? Also, BTC going up always affect the prices. If you can't sell higher than you acquired (in this case, click of a button), then you are doing something seriously wrong.
Why are you so focused on small accounts not being able to earn? They will be fine. The proposal here is more geared towards bigger stakeholders. If there are no stakeholders, nobody earns.
Let's just wait and see.
Apart from the fact that I don't like the term "policing", I never wrote that I am against the downvote option in general. My main comment under this article makes my position clear.
In the article "My STEEM Vision." I give some reasoning why I think maximization of profits like we see it here is shortsighted and doesn't lead to long-term success. The development of the STEEM price seems to confirm my point of view.
Just look thoroughly at accounts like - for example - the one of sweetsssj or haejin, and then answer the question if some big users aren't exactly doing that.
Just check how the rank of STEEM in CoinMarketCap got worse and worse. I see no reason at all why the STEEM value should have "corrected" so much more than the one of its 'crypto colleagues', apart from the one, that the STEEM community wasn't working well due to the greediness of some members and due to a system that made this greediness even more beneficial, because it's gamable too easily. (That's why I am for example in favour of a convergent rewards curve.)
Same applies to you.
But thinking is allowed, nevertheless, and my conclusions after thinking differ from yours.
Apart from that I am an investor myself, as well, and I would have invested more under different conditions. So for me the described whale behaviour does matter. Actually, I dare to claim I am not alone with this perception.
The only thing I can offer you here is to agree to disagree.
Why are you telling these stories rather than showing data? If someone makes a proposal, they have to back it up with data, no?
If you do your homework - define your success metrics and gather the data and show it to the community - you will get immediate agreement, don't you think?
If you don't have the research or data skills to do this, ask for assistance. Many will be happy to help, myself included. We have some excellent statisticians doing good work. You can also check out this post for some ideas for success metrics.
More science, less arguing for the validity of your logic and telling stories to convince others.
What is a big problem with a more scientific approach as I'm suggesting? @vandeberg mentioned that the social sciences have been struggling due to the complexity they are dealing with and difficulty in controlling for variables. However, this can be overcome with appropriate methodology and research and data skills. Books such as Lean Analytics lay out many of the aspects in detail.
If you don't want to do science, fine, but the probability of things going wrong increases, and I don't see too much acknowledgement of that.