Anonymity is hard on blockchains where by nature, everything is public. There is currently no anonymity mechanism on hive (and I don't think there will be). So we can't do it that way.
anon downvotes are indeed better, but it's not technically possible right now.
Brainstorming on this further, it became more clear to me that even if anonymous downvoting were made possible, there would be undesirable sides to it. When it is clear who is doing the voting, then the community can regulate the downvoters. Every behavior on the blockchain has to be able to be regulated in order for the whole network to work. If that does not happen, we can foresee things like downvoting for reasons other than disagreement on payout - maybe for disliking the content or having personal vendettas or whatever. Anonymity would prevent mediation and/or regulation from happening.
So maybe a different approach would work better. I was thinking of something and it's still in rudimentary form but I thought I'd share. In essence, people could post a comment on a post and the comment would contain a keyword, for example:
#shitpost. Putting this keyword on a post means that the person sees the post as having no substance, contributing no value whatsoever and being made solely to get the rewards. Frontends and tools can then display a feed of posts that have this keyword in a comment under them. People will follow those feeds and will be able to view each post and decide whether to downvote it.Two main scenarios come to mind of how this could play out:
#shitpost. This way they can be rewarded by others (with upvotes) for discovering reward pool abuse. They can also be punished by others (with downvotes) if they abuse the keyword and use it inappropriately or too much. Possible negative ramifications for the person posting the comment is that the post author may be unhappy, the relationship may be tarnished, and even downvote retaliation may be sought. However, in the last scenario, there will still be the possibility of self-regulation of the community, where if a person gets downvoted for no good reason, others may rectify that through upvotes.#shitpost. In this case, I guess if there is abuse of the keyword usage, it is not completely clear if the anonymous service should be downvoted. An upside is that the person doesn't risk their relationship with the post author being tarnished.The issue of relationships being tarnished may also be tackled with education - if people understand that efforts to improve the platform as a whole will lead to their own stake being much more worth than currently, then many of them might stop shitposting. But I don't count on education alone being enough without a self-regulation system like the above.
I'm sure others can improve on the idea. But wanted to see if you have any thoughts on it.
Sorry for the delay,
I don't really thing anonymous downvotes are this bad, proof of brain in theory doesn't require you to know who is voting/downvoting you, it's like likes/dislikes on social media.
I believe what you suggested with tags has already been though of and even tried but I don't remember when. I think it was abandoned because people people would bot the service to get downvotes to people they didn't like even if the post was good.
I think curangel has something like this where people vote on posts to be downvoted.
But it's an interesting one, having a layer 2 service where people can vote on whether a post should be downvoted or not anonymously and then a bot on which people would delegate voting power to it would downvote depending on the results of such votes.
But downvoting is always tricky and causes a lot of frustration from users and downvoters, I honestly think that while proof of brain is great on paper, it fails in real life and we should try to find another model for reward distribution altogether.
Do you have any thoughts or ideas for what that model might look like?
Not yet but it's thoughts I've been having, I need to take some time to think this through.
Cool, keen to hear when you've had some chance to think more about it.
One thing I myself am quite interested in is allowing communities to experiment with different economic models. I'm not talking about SMTs, although of course they will come later and allow even more experimentation. But what if a community owner account can be set as the mandatory beneficiary of 100% of the rewards generated in that community? Maybe those who are solely interested in the rewards will not participate, or maybe they will, depending on what the community decides to do with the rewards (e.g. a local group can have monthly parties paid for by the community's rewards, etc.). How will people's behavior in that community be different if they don't personally seek to maximize their rewards or even participate for the rewards? Hive without the rewards seems like an interesting experiment which I think can easily be tried with some additions to Hivemind.