One thing that can be tweaked is to change attitudes which currently discourage downvoting.
Downvoting plays an essential role in setting the right incentives and we just had a vivid illustration of this with the @berniesanders / @dollarvigilante incident. Many people voted for the "sure shot" of @dollarvitilante's post, and that worked great until @berniesanders (and some other whales) decided to downvote it.
Then everyone's curation rewards were wiped out in an flash, and, from the point of view of rewards, their votes were wasted.
Next time (or perhaps it will take a few more of these late downvotes), perhaps people will consider more carefully just what it is they think is a "sure" shot.
There are a lot of heated opinions on this. I've read a lot of people say that you shouldn't downvote unless it is a major violation like spamming or threatening someone, etc. Others look at it as you do, and just a different way of assigning value to posts.
One worry I have is retaliation. If I downvote someone's post, then I'm worried that they will start going out of their way to downvote all of mine. It could turn into a downvote war.
"Can't we all just get along?"
In any system with people there will be conflicts. You have to decide whether you want to let others exploit a platform that has value to you and do nothing to avoid retaliation, or if you are willing to take a stand. People will of course make different decisions.
I didn't and wouldn't say it is just a different way of assigning value, but when people are voting in a parasitic manner by piling on "sure things" without sufficient regard for quality nor consideration of the good of the platform that is also a form of abuse, and downvoting/flagging is exactly the way to control it.
The new reputation system makes it even harder to do what you are suggesting. Let's say someone writes an 'average' post, and a ton of people upvote it because it is trending and they want to get a good curation bonus. Then a person with high SP comes along and decides it is too high because everyone was colluding. It wasn't a bad post or anything - it is just overvalued. If they flag/downvote that person's post to lower the amount it gets paid, that person's reputation is affected too. Most likely the person who wrote the post didn't do anything intentionally wrong or bad to make the excessive upvotes happen. Yet their reputation score is penalized by the person who downvoted/flagged their content.
@timcliff All those upvotes (assuming the voters had positive reputation which is usually the case) increased the reputation. The later downvote reduce the reputation, reversing the effect of the upvotes. As long as the downvotes aren't extreme and overwhelming (which usually only happens in the case of serious abuse), reputation will usually be only slightly affected or even increase a little if the payout is merely reduced and not driven all the way to zero and beyond (which would be a waste of vote power by the downvoters).
@smooth I agree with @timcliff. You are trying to fix a disease by ingesting more of the parasite. Pouring more of the wrong to try to make it right.
Conflicts are a sign of a system that is not designed to be harmonious. I am entirely against your propensity (when given the role to do so) to want to top-down manage discussions and forums. I am ENTP. Seems you might have some J in there?
There will be blowback from judging. Remember Matthew 7. Instead let's figure out a way for every coterie to have their own rankings and preferences. One-size-fits-all are always power vacuums that we must fight over.
I have a good example for you. I came across @acassity spam posting a link to his content in a ton of posts. It was done in a way that was completely irrelevant and off-topic. I downvoted him, and he retaliated by going to my blog and downvoting posts of mine.
When I see 4 meta posts in a row for quick buck I will flag indeed and I care not if someone will pursue me and maybe even destroy my account. If people afraid to express true opinions the system is flowed.
Don't have down voting. You down vote by not voting at all.
Missing a few sure shots isn't going to stop people looking for them. The problem is there is too much incentive to look for them and ignore anything that from the outside looks like it won't take off...
Does voting on a post and voting on a comment use the same amount of voting power? And are the curation rewards on comments too? I realized that I did not know for sure.
They are treated the same.
Except they aren't because gambling on comments instead of blog posts is only done by a math retard, because comments (except maybe in rare circumstances) never can get the same voting potential as blog posts.
That's a shame. Because I like to use my votes as "approval" rather than "investment". But I'm not making anything on curating anyway so why bother trying make money curating? Better just to use it to show approval.
@jonno-katz if you aren't making anything from curation (and this is the case if your SP is small, say <1000), then you might as well do exactly what you are doing. Vote for purposes of approval to increases rewards authors you think should be rewarded more and exert a small influence on the type of content you want to see. It seems to me you are doing it exactly right.
@anonymint your comment is oversimplified. Remember, early votes are worth lot more than late votes. Most blog posts you encounter are already heavily voted, and late votes on even posts with high rewards are still virtually (if not literally) worthless. Most comment posts have 0-1 votes. Opportunity is not always at the location with the brightest spotlight on it.
@anonymint Wouldn't you receive a higher amount of curation from voting on a comment with $100 and being an early voter, than on a blog post that receives thousands of dollars when you have relatively little steem power.
I see the value of both, but curation for minnows is very rarely more than $.001 so it is important for them to make themselves known as one who makes valuable comments and blog posts before than can really dive into curation.
It is my belief that users should vote on content they like, and not just gamble on an article without reading it in hopes that it will make a lot of money regardless of how well it was done.
That's not an accusation to anyone, as everyone's vote can be used as they wish, but I think the more steem power you earn, the more you see that what you vote on can influence the entire platform of steemit and steer the ship in a way to benefit the maximum amount of users.
I was referring to seeking out posts to vote early versus betting on comments which don't even receive an upvote 50% of the time. I haven't done the precise computation, but I can't imagine it ever pays to focus on curation rewards from comments because they most often receive 0 votes and those which have more than 1 vote are rare and even rarer are ones upvoted by whale. The odds for comments have to orders-of-magnitude worse than seeking out blogs.
Thank you during this time.
Now, my Reputation in steemd is displayed as "Reputation 21,630,279,218,817".
Than the Reputation in Steemd acquaintances, is a high score. However, it is in Steemit "5".
Why is that?
The I'll try it has a post not good what?
What's left is the influence of the previous Down Vote?
How do I me?
@smooth, downvoting won't really discourage gambling for "sure" shots, because otherwise the ROI on curation is mostly not worth anyone's time relative to the SP they have at stake. The only way to entirely remove the gambling groupthink calculation is to radically reduce or eliminate the curation rewards, which is what I would suggest.
As I explained to @bendjmiller222 in a comment on this page, removing the early incentive (in lieu of removing curation rewards) would just cause everyone to vote for the most voted posts after the fact.
The problem with current incentives to upvote is just how many people are playing the game. As long as everybody else is playing, the game seems worthwhile as the rewards are higher.
I wouldn't suggest removing the curation rewards completely, but the stake taken from the original post could be changed so that instead of 25% of the total, curators receive a limited amount. That probably wouldn't eliminate the incentive to upvote, but you might find less people voting this way if there seems to be less people playing the game.
Currently the hole system is designed to generate exorbitant payouts.
Instead of downvoting exorbitant payouts, wouldn't it be better design the system so that it does not create these exorbitant payouts?
Right now the curation reward makes no sense at all. It just leads to upvote the same stuff from the same known people. This then makes the post trending which leads to even more votes.
What do we have to change?
I would suggest to drop the curation reward completely. If people understand that its their money they distribute they will take care for what to spent. Another solution would be to limit the curation reward per person per time period.
Second: Making the payout more linear would also reduce this over pay effect and on top of that would make the system much more simple and easy to understand. On top of that payouts could then be done instantly with every vote. Through steems blockchain transparency Self-voting could be easily detected and accounts flagged.
Third: Using a lottery like display of posts as default display option. The more votes the more chance to be chosen. A comment could also be counted as a vote with the users voting power.
If we implement these three changes the current self made over pay problem would most likely be solved.