Downvotes have nothing to do with freedom of speech! Downvotes are about reward pool allocation.
Remove it and you will get tons of abusers who will deprive the legit authors of their deserved payout.
My opinion is you are tackling the problem from the wrong side.
...reputation can only go up, in a normal situation.
Tell me about your reputation as a human, if you screw up with your friends, your boss, your family,... Will your reputation go up?
But maybe we should first agree on a definition of "a normal situation".
I do not know of any good example where reputation (i.e. trust) is linked to the level of activity, especially in a limited amount of time.
If this is your only criteria, my bots will always have a better reputation than me, at all times, because they are much more inexhaustible, patient and persevering than me.
I think that whales have no idea about how downvotes is an hammer in wrong hands.
If you remember your blacklist recent episode you have to agree that the perception of downvote bad power over people is very high.
Downvote are a bad solution for a real problem.
Let's try to find a better solution.
We think that just do not vote a post is all you need to stop plagiarism and other bad thinks.
If you are a little account and post plagiarized content and have 0 rewards, you will stop very soon.
Downvote can be used to silence, intimidate, fear this is what could happen, or, this is what the small accounts feels can happen.
We are non speaking about reputation, we are speaking about Proof of Activity, a value that allow to determine, in a block of time, how much you contribute to the community.
Reputation is about you are a good guy or a bad guy.
PoA is about how much active you are in a period of time, you can be a good guy doing nothing at all.
How to understand if you use a posting bot?
This is a good question, and is a general problem on Hive and the same can be asked about reputation and any aspect of Hive, until you let people use bots and multiple account I think that this problem can be hardly solved, but we can try to mitigate in many ways.
i.e you can create two types of users, if you want you can have a verified account, that have some privileges or an anonymous account, like now.
I think of downvotes like this...
1.) someone is breaking into a store to steal money that someone else earned. The store owner is inside and begins shooting. He may or may not kill (Lower to negative rep) the abuser. But it serves as a reminder of consequences.
2.) while an offender is breaking into the store, the community rises up and neutralizes their offender.
And lastly:
2.) just as a weapon can be used to defend, a bad person can use it to harass. Someone with 40k HP can destroy people's accounts with the click of a button. Someone with 15k HP can take the account of someone with 500HP to negative rep for any reason.
The last is a bad situation, obviously. Have people done it? Yes. But is it common, no. So why kneejerk because it happened a few times in a few years?
If you does NOT vote for him, he can NOT stole at all, is very simple.
@we-the-people here to prove #3 is @worldcapture
Because I spoke in favor of someone trying to hide her sins from Hive-Watchers, she gave life to “the wicked flee when none pursueth” and for all her shame couldn’t recognize someone saying her account wasn’t a managed account, and called me racist, and then I reported another account (a friend of hers) to buildawhale for skipping the plagiarism blacklist and bragging to me about it, and here we are where she comes to downvote everything I post because she assumes that I cannot afford to drop $500 in leased HP and fight back.
While rare that it is abused this way, it doesn’t mean that downvoting is a bad thing. It just means that she is a bad person and everyone she tricks into joining her is ignorant.
Wait, what? Hahahaha what are you even saying here?
You are a disgusting, racist, Islamophobic piece of dirt, that's why I flag you. And I will continue to flag you until you are gone from this platform. I will never accept any kind of racism.
And now get lost!
You said that’s where you found me lol
It’s ironic that the one who assumed that I was being racist simply because I suggested she has poor reading comprehension skills is calling someone else racist. Did you not judge me and assume I am racist because we are of different skin tones?
I don't even know what this post or previous conversation is about. All I do is flag everything you post or comment because you are disgusting piece of shit.
Please tell me the significance of your relationship with Tron?
@we-the-people that’s not at all what happens and you know it.
It makes me wonder if you have been caught doing something you shouldn’t. After all, we don’t defend the rapist from punishment with “if women would just sew themselves shut...”
@we-the-people here is even evidence of #3
Doesn’t mean I’m going to change my mind on the subject. We need it to get rid of those who rape the reward pool.
Ask yourself why this person would object to this comment...
