I'm perplexed that none of these low value make-up nor elementary school level crafts trending posts don't get downvoted to remove at least half of their earnings. They increased exponentially to spam level, because they've become an easy way to game the rewards.
I agree and I do when I notice them. Usually by only a portion because I don't think I should be the only one making these adjustments. Sometimes others do too, just not that often.
It is the nature of the system that downvotes aren't incentivized in any way, so for the most part nobody is going to put a lot of time into it. If we happen to see stuff, we might downvote it, otherwise not.
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.
Why does it matter if a post is one of the top 100, or in position 101?
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.
Sounds fair and it's nice to see I'm not the only one bothered by this.
This kind of behavior earns my respect and won't likely scare many people off chain. That's wielding power responsibly. If it weren't for one or two people getting off on their ability to singlehandedly destroy a post (often for arbitrary reasons), I don't think downvotes would be a big problem. As it is though, one or two bullies have the potential to scare a lot of users away, and more users means more projects will want to build on Hive and more investment with it.
We have downvotes as a check on abusive upvotes, wouldn't it make sense to have some kind of check on abusive downvotes?
Also, It sounds like you don't like having rewards for content on the first layer. Is that a popular opinion among the devs and other large stakeholders you talk to? If so then why wasn't it removed earlier to avoid confusion?
They're not equivalent. Upvotes earn rewards and generate payouts, downvotes don't. The sort of abuses are different and while downvote abuse may be annoying to an individual, it isn't systemic. The 25% limit on downvotes (essentially 2.5 full power downvotes per day) means that there are always many payouts escaping downvotes (or at least not being downvoted very much), no matter how much havoc someone wants to cause.
It is somewhat mixed but very few actually think it is working well, or has ever worked well going on six years.
In part because it is a significant task and there have been other priorities, including building out software infrastructure that would make second layer solutions more powerful and accessible. There isn't much support for removing it without better support for alternatives.