It is the nature of the system that downvotes aren't incentivized in any way
Except that they shift those rewards that are being removed right up to the top-earning posts, correct?
Or is that just an untrue thing that lots of people on here say? I haven't seen a technical breakdown of that, and can't read the code myself - but I've seen many folks explain it this way, and never seen anyone correcting them.
No, they don't. They reduce the eventual payout of the one post which results in more remaining in the pool. That larger pool then results in marginally higher payouts of other posts.
Ah. Thank you for clarifying that.
To dive deeper then...
If we say (just for me to understand) that the top 100 posts have a 80% of the rewards that have been voted out at that time, those 100 posts would also get 80% of the rewards removed from the down-voted post?
Feel free to shoot me a link or tell me to go find it if this is already laid out very clearly somewhere.
It doesn't change the distribution of other rewards, it mostly just increases all of them by a certain percentage. So if the top 100 got 80% before, the top 100 would get 80% after. Both top 100 and outside the top 100 would increase by X% (X% is very small for any single downvote of course, let's say 0.01% hypothetically).
You could have just said yes.
The correct answer is more subtle. If you're downvoting a post in the top 100 (almost always what I downvote since I don't spend a lot of time looking for downvote candidates), you are actually reducing the share of reward going to the top 100.
What is the argument against burning flagged rewards thereby benefiting all stakeholders equally rather than the current distribution giving them to the highest value posts in proportion to the rshares voted to them?
If there are 3 posts with 100, 50, and 10 htu respectively and 1000htu flagged to split among them doesn't the 100htu post get double what the 50htu and 10x what the 10htu post get?
If true, better to burn the rewards, imo.
I don't think it's that bad but burning and shifting away from one payout are two different things and voters ought to be able to do both. If voters think more should be burned overall (that is, that the overall collection of posts is not deserving of payouts, as opposed to particular ones), they can vote for burn.funder posts the way we can vote for hbd.funder (burnpost used to do this). In your example, if you think the 100 is getting too much, either before or after the 1000 is downvoted, then go ahead and downvote that one too!
That said, I don't think burning is terrible.
Why does it matter if a post is one of the top 100, or in position 101?
That's an arbitrary number, but if you're concerned with rewards being distributed more broadly, I'm pretty sure downvotes are helpful not harmful in practice. The higher payouts get downvoted more. The rewards flow to the other payouts, including the smaller ones.
The Reward Pool is a somewhat static piece which gets distributed across all votes of a period of time. You can't expand or reduce it by voting habits.
Correct, by the voting habits (specifically of whales) do decide where those rewards get allocated.
For example, if they downvote a $300 post to $0 - that $300 is added back into the rewards pool, where it will mostly be awarded to the top posts at the time.
All Rewards are mostly distributed to the top post at any given time, independent from downvoting habits.
I disagree with most voting habits on-chain too, but that's a totally different story for a small fish like me. I don't even get how you ended up as a target.
Very true - and the folks downvoting have admitted many times that they agree trending is mostly over-rewarded crap.
They just claim they don't have the voting power to do anything about it - while simultaneously zero-ing out posts that were near the top of trending.
Yep, very risky for a small fish (or anyone really) to call out this activity - because it will get you downvoted (often to negative reputation), and has guaranteed no further rewards for many a user.
Because I dared to speak out against their targeting of others, because I do have a high rep and many supporters (less risk), and I honestly don't care if they try to cancel me as well.
Well, they could be honest and just outright state that the downvotes are 'mostly peaceful' subjective disagreements. That would indeed cut some corners.
I wonder where Blocktrades is on this topic at the moment.