@tarazkp - I understand the intellectual side of your argument. The numbers about downvoting makes sense. The purpose of downvoting makes sense. The long term benefit of downvoting makes sense.
However, I have a negative emotional response to downvoting because it is confrontational. People are afraid of "flag wars" but more importantly they are afraid of a big stakeholder destroying a little guy.
Will the community rally behind this type of misuse? Maybe. That is yet to be seen. Seems like this will create a situation where you police the accounts that are smaller than your own, but not have enough power to take on account with a larger stake.
Just my 2 cents!
I've been saying for a long time that the average user will not downvote for the reasons you're mentioning. If any solution is dependent on that it will fail. It is absolutely confrontational and people don't come to a content site/service to fight with people. They want to be entertained and have fun, not attack people or be attacked.
The only hope for things like the EIP is at the whale level. If whales flag other whales stopping the large scale abuse, that could make a positive difference. Upvoting and downvoting to decide what is trending will never work when you mix in a financial incentive. We need to know when to accept that something just didn't work and focus on solutions that might work.
Some ideas:
An algorithm that take a lot more variables into consideration.
Something that maybe looks at page impressions, comments, upvotes, resteems, how quickly the upvotes came in, at what point in the posts life the votes came in, if known bots voted on the posts, etc. All to determine if something is ACTUALLY trending.
or something even simpler like what Steempeak has done, which is just make the trending page a list of posts curated by curation groups. This isn't ideal, but it's MUCH better than what's happening now.
If anyone sat around and thought about it, there's lots of potential solutions. People are dogmatically attached to this idea of downvotes as a means of sorting the content, and I think that just needs to be abandoned.
Observe user behavior and design features that empower them. Don't try to bend the user to your will, humans just don't work like that, they'll just leave.
The average investor?
The most active stake on the platform by far is the orcas and dolphins, they are also the ones who will benefit the most from a price rise. The 30 odd whales here can sell now and do well enough, nearly everyone else needs the price of Steem to go up.
And then we have google.
This isn't just about trending, it is about the entire ecosystem. This means that authors are only a part of the ecosystem, not the entirety. If this isn't a place where developers, investors and consumers want to be, the authors can still create but, they get nothing.
Yes, the average user, which won't be an investor. Is this an investment platform? It's a blogging platform that a user can choose to invest in, and will eventually hold a stake in if they continue to use it. The thing that gives it value, which would make it attractive to investors is USERS.
Just think about it like this, imagine all we had was Steemit Inc. in it's current state and NO other developments, but we had 5 million daily active users
or
We have SMT's, Communities, a super scalable solution, we fell on the perfect economics balance, but we have 50 Daily active users.
Which one is more valuable?
I'm counting Orca in "whale" in what I said previously, but anyway everyone wants the price to go up, the question is what's the most effective way to increase the price? I'm for the EIP, but I don't think it will improve the price. I'm hoping it just stops some abuse and improves the internal morale, and it would be great if distribution improved, but make no mistake, no one outside of Steem cares about this.
The bad thing about Google isn't the fact that they use algorithms. We aren't Google if we use algorithms, that's crazy. The bad thing about Google is they're collecting data from you, typically without your consent and selling it to advertisers and making huge sums of money from it without giving you anything. The bad thing about Google is that they are mining YOU for value. If we use an algorithm to get a more accurate picture of what is actually popular that just makes us functional, and capable of doing the thing we set out to do.
I do believe a trending page with better algorithms would work much better to get the good content up there, than downvotes coming from individuals. Individuals are subjective. What each one likes varies and it only needs one person with a big account to override the views of a lot of smaller accounts. Whereas, if the algorithms go more on activity, it doesn't matter what the post is earning, it matters what is being promoted by most of the community.
The upvote already allows for a certain amount of say in whether or not you agree with what someone has posted and its value. If you don't like it, you don't award it anything, if you really like it, you can give a 100% upvote, or if you like it, but feel it's already rewarded enough, just give a token 1%.
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That is up to you.
This happens now and because there is no incentive to help, no one helps.
I think there might be a few surprises.