Well, I'm glad you included the Wayback Machine link. I came here in September of 2016 when there was only an upvote and a flag button. I see now that it launched with an upvote and a downvote button. That appears to have gone on from 03-24-16 through 07-04-16. Sometime between July 5th and 6th of 2016, the downvote button got removed and turned into a flag. We had about three years of that, then the flag for specific use cases, as opposed to a downvote, that got changed sometime on May the 2nd, 2019.
I also see that @timcliff had some role in "making downvotes great again," but in that post, he highlighted shit-post-spam-comments. Now, I can see the stakeholder argument. And maybe some stakeholders want to be completely amoral and perhaps even cruel by excluding certain content from receiving inflation from the reward pool. But here's the thing, whether it be the shit-post comments Tim drew attention to, or Haejin's Elliot curve charts, or your @hbd.funder comments, which presumably does something? I'm no genius on this stuff.
However, the community managed to organize and change the code to tax content creators 25% in favor of giving these rewards to curators for the so-called "greater good." The change, according to your seemingly amoral viewpoint that stakeholders can do whatever they are empowered to do—that must have been unnecessary in your eyes? It should suffice to say that some of these intellectual quagmires hinged upon token functionality that never existed in the first place, and that's PoB.
PoB was supposed to make it all make sense, and if they could have tapped the crowd wisdom, it would have made sense. There'd be no disagreement because rewards would be fair. But as you and I know, it's impossible to tap into crowd wisdom without breaking the other things. But I don't think this should stop the HIVE Layer 1 community from encouraging a healthy downvote culture or outside-of-the-box solutions.
Here's the thing: Every time you get someone new to HIVE, if you have to rewire the way they see the world for it to work, then it's the product that's broken, not the people. I'm sure when the King got his new clothes, the swindlers who sold the "outfit" said something to the effect that only people of royal blood are capable of appreciating this precious fabric. And there you have it, with some simple word magic, a little gaslighting, and a sprinkle of Asch conformity, they buffaloed the sovereign of the land.
Long story short: I think we need to respect the social dApp roots of the platform--it's what drew content creators in to publish here, and it was their positive word-of-mouth that helped to grow our numbers. If we cannot create a system for wisdom to prevail on layer one, then more and more people will become less willing to spend time here and continue to grow this ever-expanding digital library.
We will lose intelligent and generally positive influencers like Kenny. The inverted negative word-of-mouth will set the tone for would-be stakeholders. And the market will continue to judge us as it has, and it will continue to find us lacking. This hostile working environment will cause the token to remain lower in value than it could be because of the unproductive and generally caustic atmosphere set by a few stakeholders. You are the minority on this one.
We can certainly work to improve the social dApp component. I would suggest that is probably best done by further supporting and emphasizing second layer innovation, which is frankly where most of the social innovation has ever happened on Hive/Steem anyway, as you can see from looking at those wayback links where things look pretty damn close to the same now as five years ago. It's too slow and too much of a quagmire to try to build social into the base layer. It was done that way in 2016 largely for feasibility, and for a frankly questionable at best business model of a startup that no longer exists. Times have changed.
The hbd.funder comments support the hbdstabilizer, which both supports the stability of HBD, along with earning a profit (at least 1 million USD) for Hive (largely, though this is somewhat speculative, in the form of higher HIVE price, which also feeds back to higher rewards for creators). The stakeholders voting for hbd.funder, including myself, think those benefits are a good use of reward funds and that they help Hive, which is why we vote for it.
I figured I'd address both of your comments in this one. I can appreciate your work with the HBD stabilizer if it's going to try and peg to the dollar or be stable(ish). The problem now is that we're rapidly entering into hyperinflation, and I'm sure we'll probably go full-Zimbabwe with it. I don't know if this was ever done with the so-called "world's reserve currency" in the past. I see a lot of turbulence ahead, and a dollar peg might become more and more useless as the dollar becomes more and more valueless. And then they'll transition to digital. Who knows if pegging to something digital will be a transition for the work that lays ahead for you. Regarding second layer innovation. If you believe HMTs, as opposed to sidechain tokenomics, are in HIVE's near future, then maybe you could do people a solid for several months and put the velvet glove back on the iron fist, if not only for the sake of optics.
Maybe so. We have the option to take an exit ramp on the HBD peg and switch to something else if the dollar degrades into uselessness. We know how to do it and it's been discussed numerous times.