Here's the main problem with downvotes. Imagine that I start a band, say it's a cover band of some really popular band, then some other cover band that does the same thing as my band gets jealous of my band's growing popularity and gets all of their fans (who happen to have more money) to downvote all of my band's songs, basically making them invisible.
Imagine that steemit gets pretty popular somehow magically and grows to a modest 2 million active users. Now, this isn't very far fetched, just imagine the Chinese government decides it wants to de facto censor any negative comments about communism. They've got the money, they've got the motivation, and thanks to downvotes, they've got the perfect weapon.
Fair point, but that is based on the assumption that there aren't enough good actors to counter the effect of a select few bad actors. Taking your band analogy for example, if your band is popular enough, there should be more upvotes than downvotes (assuming only the enemy band is downvoting you). In addition, the party doing the downvotes is also having a opportunity cost as they could otherwise use upvoted for curation rewards. However, I do agree that the side performing downvotes have a slight advantage after HF21/22 considering there is a free downvote pool. Perhaps it requires further tweaking if there are clear cases of abuse.
As for the case of government funded downvotes, I think it is more about how posts are being discovered on this platform. As it stands, posts with higher rewards are getting more attention thanks to the trending page. But there are active curators that are discovering undervalued posts on a daily basis, counteracting the effect. Besides, there are many other cost effective ways governments can censor content. Using China as an example, their Great Firewall can block any Steem interfaces/API nodes as they please. So if it ever reach the point where governments need to downvote Steem content as part of their censorship, that means Steem has grown to a level far exceeding the current size.
We need to pay people ad sharing revenue for pageviews, fairly and transparently and for way longer than 7 days.
Fully agree to this. I think 7 days reward window is too short to motivate people to create content that are aimed to be far-reaching and long-term. I recently got to know about the Steem Forever service. It aims to reward content beyond the 7 days window. This is one small step forward and I think all Steem interfaces should embrace this approach and reward content beyond 7 days. Ideally, all content should be perpetually open for reward and that should be coded into the blockchain itself.
Ad-revenue sharing will be nice as well and that requires all Steem interfaces to participate. As far as I know, not all interfaces are showing Ads. In addition, I hope that Steem can one day integrate with Basic Attention Token so that content creators can get rewarded with BAT directly.
Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful reply.
Actually, China spends a lot of time and money censoring American news programs and movies. The recent story about the NBA getting threatened because someone said "Free Hong Kong" is just the tip of the proverbial ice-berg.
Blizzard corp recently banned a top-ranked-international-player for saying, "Free Hong Kong" in order to appease Chinese censors as well.
That's my whole point. "If my band is popular enough".
What if the other band has 10 times the fan-base?
The downvotes allow (larger/richer) groups to effectively censor any competitors.