This is why stake-vote-negation is actually a more elegant solution to counter malicious whales than downvotes. It was proposed all the way back in 2016 by Dan Larimer, but the community considered it a form of censorship and it was never implemented.
Stake vote negation would mean that it takes far less effort for a prosocial whale to counteract an antisocial whale, while at the same time it also means that users who have stake collectively can each commit part of their stake, without one or few having to sacrifice all their voting power or dedicate enormous time to counter selfish or malicious behaviour.
Stake vote negation would achieve the same thing as downvotes without all the collateral damage of people thinking they are being attacked personally for no reason. The kinds of abuse that are possible with it are also easily countered by delegation (which is essentially the inverse).
Can u elaborate on that? Is it reputation based or what?
Let's say you have 2 users each with 100,000 HP, Alice and Bob. Bob is voting selfishly, either his own posts or just randomly upvoting posts. Alice judges Bob's behaviour to be harmful enough that it is worth sacrificing some of her own rewards to counter Bob's.
Alice has tried talking to Bob, but didn't make any progress. In fact Bob started downvoting Alice's posts for merely suggesting that he should change his voting behaviour, which he says is censorship. Alice could in the current system downvote everything that Bob upvotes. We have seen how this plays out, it 'works' to a degree, but is pretty shitty for all involved, especially Carol the third party who posts paintings that she makes, who finds herself being upvoted by Bob and downvoted by Alice. As far as Carol is concerned, she is being told her posts are bad and abusive for no reason, and Alice is the bad guy.
Stake-vote-negation is a separate option from downvoting. Instead of having to direct her attention to everything Bob is doing, she applies a 30 day negation of 100,000 HP to Bob. That 100,000 HP is no longer counted for her own votes, but Bob also gets a -100,000 HP on his votes for 30 days. It's effectively timeout for both of them. Bob can still power down, he still gets the basic stake reward, but can't get the curation rewards he expects from his 100,000 HP.
Now to other users, Bob is just a minnow randomly voting on posts. Carol doesn't even notice that he is voting for her at all, nor does she notice Alice, who doesn't have to downvote her.
There are ways for stake-vote-negation itself to be abused. For example, a whale could maliciously negate the stake of random small users for no reason more than to troll the community. However this kind of abuse is itself quite easy to negate by other whales by providing delegations to users who experience this kind of abuse.
Stake vote negation also makes it easier for a bunch of smaller users to act collectively to police abuse. If there are 10 users, each with 20,000 HP, all 10 of them can each negate 10,000 HP of Bob's (100,000 in total). They can then keep posting on Hive like normal, but with only 10,000 HP of their own power for upvotes and curation. There isn't a need for one person to completely sacrifice their life on Hive.
Hmm, interesting. I guess it would in some ways be "worth it" if certain users really are a abusive and if there's users willing to sacrifice/park some of their HP to negate others. I like that there's a cost so others wouldn't just randomly negate other people's stake no matter if they're doing good or bad with it but there's also the question of those who don't care about the stake or curation returns, looking at some of xeldal's voting pattern lately and for a long time, for instance, he's been steady under 2-3% APR losing out on a lot of curation returns than if he'd just give up on his current ways and vote similarly to rancho instead on posts already doing well that others won't be able to effect their returns as much. It's almost like he's okay with it as long as it paints Marky/the platform in a bad picture.
Another idea I've been thinking about is if there'd be a downvote pool, or take half of the current one. I.e. Alice votes on Carol and Bob downvotes Alice's upvote but Carol still gets the author rewards that Alice sent her. This would be pretty limited (12.5% mana) so if certain accounts are really misbehaving/have misbehaved badly over a long period of time, there'd be more accounts able to negate their curation rewards without affecting authors. The thing about this idea, though, is that it opens up a lot more abuse vectors and accounts just trying to maximize curation rewards by utilizing their 12.5% mana to take from other's curation rewards even if unwarranted. Maybe instead of the "free" downvote pool it would cost upvote mana instead, so you'd still have to give up some curation returns but the rest of stakeholders got more instead by nulling the curation returns of the "bad behaving account". If their behavior changes the downvoter would naturally stop and go back to receiving more curation rewards while allowing the bad one turned good to earn curation rewards again. Dunno, there was a lot of talks in @dreamsteem's post so was just one idea I was experimenting with but too many loose ends.
The thing about stake-vote-negation is that it is pretty hard to find something simpler and more elegant. It works both to counter curation-related abuse and author-reward related abuse. It greatly reduces the mental overhead involved in policing abuse and it is not technically complex (it's basically just an inverse of delegation).
Stake-vote-negation flips this on its head. Now Bob doesn't get seen as a nice guy just giving out upvotes randomly, but as just some neutered account. Alice doesn't come out as the bad guy.
The main problem with it in the Steem days no longer exists - that is that steemit being a mega-whale could have potentially negated every other player in the system and still had stake to spare. The stake has been much more widely distributed since and there is no longer a single whale account with that level of power that could potentially be abused.
It turns out, Carol was me the whole time.
I hadn't heard of negative delegation before. I can see some merit in it. Delegation is one of the secret weapons of Hive anyway. Any of the tools can be used for evil, but then the platform should be neutral and let people decide how it plays out.
BTW, it is @dreemsteem. You have a typo there.
So in future I need to get in touch with (circle jerking) whales even more?
Or my stake will just be negated
"However this kind of abuse is itself quite easy to negate by other whales by providing delegations to users who experience this kind of abuse."
great
sadly I only got a few delegations in my 5 years here
and A LOT OF ANGRY WHALES or ORCAS
There is no perfect solution. Larger stakeholders abusing smaller ones is already possible and already requires intervention from other large stakeholders. There is little reason to think that this would increase it, and in all likelihood it makes it easier for smaller stakeholders to group together to counter abuse, making for less reliance on larger ones.
Can Bob just delegate to one of his other accounts, and then just keep voting?
No. If that were possible it would not have been implemented correctly.
yeah, that's... a terrible idea.