What many people may not realize is that Ned and Dan originally set out to design an up-vote-only, positive platform. They felt that the negative experience of "losing money by popular vote" would harm user experience. The system of up and down votes that we have to day is out of necessity not desire. We have to design systems that are fully compatible with the laws of human nature (game theory).
The majority of people are good people who have the community interest at heart. The challenge for these good people is that they cannot conceive of the amount of time and energy people will invest to profit at the expense of the whole. Today I want to take you through the evolution from up-vote-only to the system we have today. I am sure there are other systems that could be developed, but I promise you they all employ some kind of punishment for bad behavior.
On the surface up vote only sounds very appealing because "down votes" are perceived as a personal attack on another user. We tend to magnify the negative and ignore the positive in our life which results is most people perceiving a down vote much more painfully than the joy they get from the same up vote. This is magnified further when a down vote is applied after massive potential rewards have accumulated because small votes have greater impact on large payouts than small ones.
Every so often someone gets upset and "rage flags" another user costing them potential income and reputation. Sometimes this goes so far as to hide someones content from the default values. Sometimes flags are abusive, sometimes they are merely a difference of opinion and it is impossible to identify the difference objectively. Not everyone is emotionally mature enough to accept the consequences of a difference of opinion without feeling anger and resentment.
What if everyone was Good?
If we assume a user base of honest individuals voting on content that adds value and not voting on content that takes value away then the following system would make the most sense: all votes carry equal weight and payouts are linear.
This simple system is subject to sybil attack by people creating many accounts, so we do stake weighted voting to counter fake accounts. Assuming this was the only problem then we could do linear rewards and up vote only.
Under a linear reward model the logical choice is to vote on your own posts as often as you can. This is the other half of sybil only with "fake posts". To prevent this Steem introduced voting power which rate-limits how often someone can vote.
After eliminating fake posts we are still left with the fact that the logical choice (to maximize personal return) is to vote only on your own content as often as the rate limiting will allow you. This is almost identical to paying people interest which in turn would not redistribute funds and therefore would be pointless. Some people may choose to vote for others, but in this case the incentives are identical to a tipping model and subject to similar mental costs as micro payment systems.
So we need to discourage people from voting on their "own" content and encourage them to vote on other people's content. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether two accounts really belong to the same person. The more STEEM POWER an account has the more unique it is and the less likely it is to be fake. Likewise, the more collective votes a post receives the less likely it is to be fake.
Steem introduced the super-linear (n^2) reward system as a natural way of ensuring rewards only go to posts that have strong consensus. Some people may vote for themselves, but the rate of return will be low enough due to being low on the n^2 curve that it is an acceptable cost of doing business. To put it in terms of "micro payments", imagine that you were given the choice to pay yourself $0.01 or to tip someone $1.00. For most people it isn't worth it to work for $0.01, but it would be worth it to them to see someone else receive $1.00. The value of giving $1.00 is much greater than the opportunity cost of $0.01. This is especially true for smaller stakeholders whose vote is unable to climb above the $0.02 threshold for payout. In these cases the cost is $0.00.
Now with this system (which is so far up-vote only), a group of people can decide to get together and form a "reward mining pool". They will all up vote an empty post to allocate the maximum rewards possible on the n^2 curve and then they will divide the rewards linearly. Everyone who joins in profits with higher interest while the reward pool for everyone else shrinks quickly. The logical endgame is that everyone joins the pool or they will be inflated away for no benefit.
It is my belief that the majority of people want to see good things achieved by the group, while a minority wishes to exploit the group and/or cause harm. If the rules favor corruption and don't provide tools to fight it, then eventually everyone (including the good people) will become corrupt.
Fighting corrupt behavior in a subjective world means that actions have consequences. Any action without consequences will be abused by a minority if they can gain even a small benefit. The most basic consequence is a loss of reputation of an individual user. This is a one-time consequence. Once you lose your reputation you can start another account and continue. It is also not financial and only matters if you care about what the community thinks. If you cared about the community then you wouldn't be abusing it in the first place.
Socialized Costs and Privatized Profits
The costs of bad behavior are socialized, but the benefits are privatized. This creates a situation where the community as a whole suffers so that a few individuals can enjoy breaking other people's toys and/or keep a small profit. This kind of behavior is like pollution, it lowers the quality of life of everyone so some factories can profit.
Spam and bogus up votes come at a cost to the community. The network is bloated, the website is filled with spam, people start trolling, etc. Many of these things can be handled with filters like NSFW, but the economic costs cannot be hidden.
If someone steels a dollar from the community, then it is large enough to be worth their while to do. This same dollar costs every other user less than $0.001 (an imperceptible amount). This means that no individual user feels "attacked" even though all users were attacked.
The market loves easy money and anytime someone is making high profit margins more people will join in. Fear of missing out will kick in. Eventually one person earning a quick $1.00 will turn into 100 people working together to earn a quick $1000 ($10 each). Some people may object to "polluting" on moral grounds, but without economic checks and balances the profit motive takes over.
Eventually the collective behavior of all the polluters kills all life on the platform. The polluters are suffering from tragedy of the commons. They each take as much as they can today without caring about the sustainability of their collective actions.
Policing Anti-social Behavior
A community consisting of mostly good people can fight of an infection of anti-social individuals hoping to get something for nothing, but only if they have the power to deny rewards or claw it back. In the case of industrial pollution, the people should be able to deny the factory their profits if it comes at the expense of everyone else. This is highly subjective, but a coordinated shunning of purchasing a factories products would shut them down without violence.
We know that in practice consumers prefer the benefit of lower prices at the cost of the pollution. Individually the consumer shares in the privatized profits of the factory. This means those responsible for the pollution are not just the factory owners, but everyone who buys their products. You will not get a large and organized boycott of factory products, especially if there are 1000's of factories that each individually produce an imperceptible amount of pollution.
An up vote only system is an economy where consumers (voters) will vote for things that profit them (voting pools/vote buying) and there is no recourse from those who suffer the costs of the pollution. This leaves one outcome, everyone pollutes to get the most from a bad situation.
Down Vote adds Cost to Producers
Without down votes, all factories operate with little or no cost. A down vote is a way for those who do not like the factories profits to express their perception of the cost of pollution. A down vote is not free, it comes at the expense of purchasing something else. This means that for the majority of people down votes are only used when they perceive the cost as being greater than the value they could get by up voting something else. One of the "costs of down voting" is loss of reputation and retaliatory down votes.
This puts the entire community in a multi-party/iterative prisoners dilemma where the ideal strategy for success is tit-for-tat. Without the ability to punish other players the prisoners suffer the worst possible outcome of "always defecting".
Abuse of Down Votes
Anything that can be used for good can also be used for evil. Some people may dislike a company that is producing clean energy for the economy. They will view the opportunity to hurt the company as having private value to themselves even if it has social costs for everyone else. At this point they start abusing the down vote to take profits from a company and potentially drive it out of business.
The problem with "pollution" is that it is subjective. If someone has done something to upset you enough to down vote them, then it is arguable that there was some kind of pollution. So long as the factory produces enough profits to cover the costs it incurs then all is well. The market will drive all factories that are not perceived as having more benefits than the pollution costs out of business. Many apparently good businesses may suffer if enough people believe in bogus pollution allegations (ie: CO2).
Vote Pollution
Game theory dictates a tit-for-tat strategy. Any actions that do not have a corresponding counter-action are sources of potential abuse. In this case, someone who votes poorly but never posts is currently immune from tit-for-tat reactions. People can write bots to compensate victims of down vote abuse just like they down vote content suffering from up-vote abuse.
Abusers Whine Loudest at Defensive Measures
A factory generating huge profits from their pollution will cry foul if people start inflicting costs on their business. They will claim that "good people will lose jobs" and that consumers will pay more. They will claim that their rights are being violated while ignoring the "micro-aggression" against all other users that collective adds up to a real aggression.
Companies that are socially responsible and produce products desired by the majority will prosper and have no fear of being victim of defensive measures. Smart companies will be pro-active in managing their PR to ensure that they don't piss people off for any reason. Overall the community will be more civilized if there is properly balanced tit-for-tat.
Just because the community is balanced doesn't mean that it will be accepting to individual views or that "good" businesses will not be driven out. It simply means that the majority of "people with good intentions" will be guiding the ship the best way they know how. No tit-for-tat system can police a system with a majority of "people with bad intentions". In some cases intentions don't matter. You cannot fix stupid. If a majority is "stupid" then the economy will sink until the majority wake up.
Banning Down Votes is like Banning Guns
If you ban guns, then only the bad guys (including government) will have guns. They will use their guns to secure privatized profits at the hands of those without guns. Eventually everyone will have to become an "outlaw" if only to defend themselves from the gangs (including government). In this analogy, up votes represent guns in government hands while down votes represent guns in the hands of the people. Criminal gangs represent private voting pools that split rewards. A whale is nothing more than a well-organized gang (aka government). Often times governments are in bed with criminal gangs.
The current Steem rules are like a society where everyone is armed, but only those who own real estate can be hurt. In this case real estate are posts with positive pending payouts. If you down vote poorly you break the windows of individual businesses. If you up vote poorly you shoot holes in all businesses.
Conclusion
The only civilized society is one where all people have equal access to tit-for-tat strategies. Give every man a gun and no man shelter. Some people may die due to acts of passion or psychopathic aggression, but most people will treat each-other with respect out of fear of getting shot.
I am a proponent of non-violent solutions so my analogy to guns should not be interpreted to my belief that voting (up or down) is violent. Instead, I am advocating a personal right to self-defense. An up-vote only system denies the masses a right to self defense against abusers. An up and down vote system means everyone has the ability to defend themselves and their community. In many cases a flag war is mutually assured destruction of the parties involved. Those who do not get involved in the war inherit the earth and a more peaceful remains.
One More Thing: What about Power Imbalance?
Some people have pistols while others have nukes. The short answer is that those with nukes fear being nuked by others with nukes as well as an uprising of the masses. Anyone who gets persecuted by a nuclear power will find sympathy from the other powers who see the entire economy suffer as a result. Those with nukes (large steem power balances) have the most to lose if social oppression kills the Steem economy.
So should we eliminate down votes? No. We need to carefully consider adding new features to further counter-balance voters who have nothing to lose. Only then will we be able to put a stop to reckless down voting by whales and other users.
that's interesting to read... thank you 😊 @peekbit
That was a great read not just due to Steemit but whole Game Theory
Thank you (@dantheman or Steemit?) for this excellent post.
I have a question in regards to the the following:
As the quoted paragraph says, what is considered an 'infection of anti-social individuals' is 'subjective'. Should Steemit Inc therefore create a Terms of Service agreement for the STEEM chain, which would prohibit certain behaviors and/or content, and thus make rules clear and equal for everyone?
I don't think any one person or group should define the rules. They should emerge naturally as a result of each individuals voting decisions. Obviously we have a lot of voting power we could use, but using our voting power creates its own kind of pollution.
I have stated in the past that a constitution of sorts may be helpful in guiding peoples voting and helping people reach consensus. I think the best we can do is remove the stigma of a down vote the best we can.
Currently the down-vote is labeled as a reporting tool for:
Is it effective within these constraints?
Furthermore, what exactly does this mean:
Should a down-vote become merely subject to expression of individual opinion, such as a down-vote on Reddit (ie. if I don't like something just because, I can downvote it).
If so, what stops a select few, whom have the monopoly on voting power from abusing this power - for example to censor things they don't like or have conflicting personal interests with?
In my view as long as stake is heavily concentrated, stake-weighted voting will not simply not ever work very well. Stake needs to be more widely distributed or the entire concept is an exercise in fooling ourselves. This is not at all limited to downvotes but applies equally to a bunch of oligarchs deciding where the rewards go with upvotes.
It is little different from an election in a population of 1 million people where one of those people, the dictator, gets 1 million votes. That is not fixable within the confines of a stake-weighted voting system. While less extreme than this 50%+1 example, unequal voting weights will still always convey power that is superlinear in size of stake, for both theoretical and practical reasons.
It remains an open question whether stake in a system like this will ever be well distributed.
What do you consider "well distributed"? And do you not think there should be incentive for people to accumulate stake? If you're mostly talking about original mega-whales, I do see such concentrated stake as problematic if it were to persist. But there seems to be lots of powering down, so we're heading in the right direction and hopefully it will continue to a meaningful extent. Not to mention, we're starting to get more distribution of voting power (via delegation), which should help just as much as distribution of stake when it comes to what content is getting upvoted, no?
As for use of the flag, this is where I see concentrated stake being the most destructive. Imagine a content creator with a large following considering committing to steemit. If they see whales downvoting posts just because they think the author is being rewarded too much (or not engaging to the whale's satisfaction), what are the chances they would bother bringing their following here? Slim to none. If we don't get that under control, I don't think we'll ever experience substantial growth.
It was more of a general observation in response to the question about what happens when a few people have power and abuse it. I wasn't referring specifically to the original whales but that's certainly an issue currently. As I said it is unclear whether stake and power will diffuse sufficiently to negate or minimize these problems, but that doesn't mean they won't. I see little in the way of strong evidence either way, and examples from other systems where power and stake both concentrates and those where it doesn't. Our own system is too new to draw many conclusions from it.
Not necessarily. There will always be a degree of golden rule where those with the most stake set the rules on those to whom it is delegated. In any voting system, stake is power, ultimately.
Regarding your example of a content creator being downvoted, it really depends. As the post discusses, there can be cases where there is a single large gain or loss in one place but a large number of small gains or losses elsewhere. If the rewards are redistributed from that content creator to many others, and that does more good in the aggregate, it may be a net gain. This is likely impossible to measure or answer objectively. Voters having different views on things is not necessarily abuse.
Also concentrated stake can take multiple forms. Services which collect up voting rights from many users and then deploy it in a concentrated manner can be a form of stake concentration and can lead to exactly the kinds of voting abuses described in the post. But it is difficult to ever say objectively when or if this is occurring. Again voters may reasonably disagree.
Wow!!!! @tombstone I seriously now have an immense amount of respect for you.
With my own personal experiences from whales abusing their power (although I could see where they are coming from). I feel that it is something that needs to be taken into consideration, and needs to be controlled.
I feel that the abuse of power not only is driving away new members, but big ones. As previously stated in posts, and now backing what you say here. I can only agree 100% with you that as someone who has a decent following elsewhere on the internet, my steemit following is mainly derived from in house building. Occasionally, I advertised, supported, and promoted Steemit on these other platforms and social media, but the biggest problem I have in bringing over people to Steemit, is that it is to easy to google "steemit" and see news stories about abuse, problems, and even hacking.
A lot of people get excited about Steemit and then run into problems and realize underlying issues. For the most part, as someone who is able to pursue and talk to people based on their needs, wants, ideology, and understanding. I feel I connect with people on a personal basis and that becomes a better way for me to understand how to bring to light something useful like steemit.
I am trying, to build, help grow, and develop this wonderful community, even with small problems and simple obstacles I find that there is always something to learn, a reason to continue the fight, and more importantly a reason to share this experience.
Thank you for this bit of information from someone of your influence and caliber, it has given me great joy to understand more about the way things work, and the insight from someone who obviously cares about Steemit as a whole and not just about their own self.
~Timbo
Yep happening. See @haejin..
I think payout voting thread replies dialogue is undervalued and could use heightened reward promotion too.
This is why we need a way to punish those who abuse down voting without posting. Punishment is also subjective.
There is no objective way to handle things and people can always lie about their motives.
After re-reading the original post, I think I'm starting to understand your points.
One of the issues with the current implementation of downvotes is that they are a lot more powerful than upvotes, in regards to censorship. For example (I'm making these numbers up to illustrate a point), an upvote on a blank post from a whale X could get it from $0 to $10 in rewards and barely improve its ranking.
A downvote from whale X on a post with $200 could remove $50 in rewards, and obliterate posts ranking.
Would it make sense to change the implementation to require a consensus on downvotes, if down-votes should be made equal to upvotes, so that down-votes would have their own pool that starts at 0, just like the upvote pool. This way, a $50 reduction would require same amount of down-vote consensus as the $50 increase.
Could this at least partially reduce potential for abuse?
Another question I have is that if Steemit shards into sub-reddits, would it make sense that each community gains the ability to set its own rules (or community guidelines) for what the desired behavior is?
An upvote and down vote have equal power if you compare equal times.
A post with $200 with an up vote of X would add $75 while a down vote would only remove $50.
The order of voting shouldn't matter when calculating its impact on the final reward.
Likely what actually happens is they up voted using a sliding value for their voting power, and then when they down voted they used a higher percentage on that slider. This is speculation on my part.
@furion
Adding plus Fat Trimming.
You are right 'subjective' "Punishment" serves no purpose to life. If used at all it needs to be objective. I also disagree that everything that can be used for good can also be used for bad, i.e. love.
That was the best post which I read this month. Topic which you described is really difficult, but still you explained it in very elegant way. You have talent for that, and now you have new follower ;)
Lately I spent some time on think about problems of auto-upvotes (my last non-profit post also mentioning about that). I believe that auto-upvotes are another really big problem on steemit. I am really curious, what you think about them.
I started to think, that so many auto-upvotes appeared on the platform mostly because of the rewards for voting. Without those rewards, the incentive to auto-upvote would came only from people which want to support particular kind of content. Right now, we have additional problem, that people also upvotes posts just because other people are doing the same.. so wrong decisions are auto-propagate even further, because then those posts are highlighted and can gather even more attention.
In my opinion, system like steemit with a lot of autoupvotes and very small user-retention at some point can will stuck with certain amount of people which will be constantly auto-upvoted by people which are no longer on the platform (BTW actually only downvotes can help to certain point). I believe this is a question from area of game theory.
I agree! I feel like we have already seen these scenarios play out to some extent on small scales from time to time.
Great post. I wrote on this with a more comical perspective HERE and feel everyone should really, "give a crap" about this community and maybe show a little more compassion for the users, struggling to find a comfortable place in the community. You never know when your going to face this power abuse and it might just come out of nowhere and bite you on the ass, even worst if you feel it's your best work yet.
Something needs to change, quick
Well written and thoughtful post. It gives me a lot to think about. I posted a post last night on this subject, and perhaps that may have inspired you in some way to write this. If it did not, no matter, I intend to resteem your post as I believe it is valuable and offers some important perspectives.
I hope you take time to publish a response to this. It is clear you care about @steem and I would be interested if this article and other comments has swayed your opinion.
Sure. Especially since you requested it. I want to think about it a bit before I post, but I definitely will. It was a lot of good food for thought. I will say now it has potentially addressed most of my concerns. If we didn't have cases where some very powerful couldn't smash down those for subjective/opinion reasons to the degree we have it now I think it would be less of an issue. So perhaps if as this article seems to indicate we really need a down vote as the opposing force dictated by game theory that the real issue is not the down vote, but how it can manifest with the disparity of power. I am also not in favor of equalizing power, people get their steem power by purchase and/or activity and I believe this is a beautiful thing. So I do not want to neuter those with power. I would like to find out some way to perhaps reduce the impact such a down vote can have on people. I do care, otherwise I'd not be so passionate about something that hasn't even happened to me personally. I can tell you care about it as well. I will write a response. Perhaps later today, if not within the next day or so. I want to mentally digest what is in that other article first. :)
I do have a question for you that I just thought of that I really need to perhaps get a grasp on in terms of "Game Theory".
It is said that the down vote is a necessary opposite to the up vote.
Where is this when I walk into a book store?
As I stated, I do not walk around putting red check marks on all of the books on sports, or knitting, or things I have no interest on. I walk to the things I am interested in, I buy them, and I walk out.
About the only way I see something like this might manifest is when I ask someone "Is this any good?"
So this necessary opposite doesn't always seem to manifest as it seems the down vote does.
Is this the case?
EDIT: Though I do realize Gaming the system is still an issue.
The red checkmark (cost) is in unsold books leading to the publisher taking losses.
If people had to "pay to post" then there would also be less abuse.
The cost to abusing STEEM is almost nothing compared to the profits. The profit margin in publishing is much smaller and riskier.
That makes sense. Thanks for the quick response. Back to thinking I go.
I'm not sure that analogy fits @dantheman. I see the example as an analogy of a system that only provides upvotes without (explicit) downvotes. To infer that not buying a book is a downvote is like saying not upvoting in steemit is a downvote. If that were true game theory balance would exist and there would be no need for Steemit's downvoting.
I thought this article and the majority of comments were very well articulated and this is one of the best threads I've read about the Steemit governance model. Also very glad to see your active participation and payment of attention given to it.
Namaste!
I have written a post. Not everything has settled, but I thought I should at least post something while the ideas are fresh.
Enjoyed this immensely thank you
Very interesting [email protected] you for sharing.upvote.best regards from Germany.
Excellent content, great read! Loving your thought process!
UPVOTED AND RESTEEMED
Excellent article.
Very good analysis here, thanks for writing this; and Happy New Year!
this was a really good post... wow
upvoted
I think the community can handle abusive downvoting whales. When the dark side appears (and the community agrees this is a problem), light side of the force will appear soon, for instance offsetting whale bots by auto-upvoting.
The Force is strong with the light side... ;)
yes but the problem is - there can be a whale downvoting others who never posts.
then u cant hurt him and he gets more and more SP from his stake. and you will loose resources and reward stake pool to ie upvoe what he downvotes and this wont move anywhere
Downvoting does not give him more SP from his stake. It actually takes away potential to earn by using up valuable and scarce voting power.
Ah gotcha but if the reason to make downvote button is to fight "upvoting guilds" wont we double enemies by creating opportunity of making "downvoting guilds" ?
I mean now if you dont vote on somebody - its same as you flagged him - you dont pass him money just the person does not know if you read it and think its bad or you didnt. Lets a person feel good then.
If person came and got flagged all the time because ie posts about things others dont like - wouldnt it be not fair?
I do not know i just like positive energy here and i think downvoting could go more rogue than just fixing the issue that we have now.
Also FB was thinking of making "unlike button" but never did - because it would make users upset in the end who get unlikes from others.
There does not exist the same incentives to abusively downvote as to upvote. It can in some cases be a problem but I think the concern is largely overblown. SP and voting power are valuable scarce resources that can be used to earn money. People who use their votes for malicious downvoting are incurring a cost to themselves (opportunity cost). That isn't enough to ensure it never happens, but perhaps it is just something that will be rare in practice can be considered an acceptable cost (not saying this is necessarily true, but it could be).
I do think there is a bigger problem with this whole idea, which is "good downvoting" being an undersupplied public good. In all likelyhood as the system matures and becomes more competitive we will see very little downvoting, even in cases where it is actually needed.
Gotcha, bright thinking. Gave you my last witness vote that was left :)
[reply to nested comment]
Thanks for the witness vote, but please vote for me as a witness only if you think I'm doing good job as a witness. I do my best.
you dont miss blocks and u want good for the platform so its all good!
I got as far as the 2nd paragraph, then realized I had to clarify something before reading the rest and commenting further:
"The real goal is to eliminate "punishment" because no one likes to be singled out for punishment. Punishment also "divides" us and many people perceive it as an act of violence against one individual."
Is it the case that any solutions in regard to the upvote/downvote/flag conundrum have to be in accordance to this anarcho-Capitalist ideology? If so I then I believe it is very likely insoluble. Is Steemit to be run along these very niche ideological lines? I'm asking because if we want Steemit to go mainstream then you have a very serious problem. If so, how broad is your concept of "punishment"?. Does it cover things such as returning ill gotten gains from gaming the system and such like? If so then to all those who say "Tax is theft" are you OK with "Theft is Tax" because those that thieve are a tax on others.
Steemit is a decentralized system of governance with an aim toward censorship resistance. This means developing systems that self-correct, self-heal, and do not depend upon any kind of hierarchy. It is bound to be messy, but so is the free market.
I think that those who are against down votes don't like the feeling of punishment that comes with them. Whether something is theft or not depends upon the consensus of property rights.
That's the long tedious process of anarchistic living :). When people understand more, and share more of a common basis for reality, that difficulty gets reduced more and more... but it takes people to learn in order to understand how to operate and live this way.
Can the community create trusted agents to evaluate unfair flags and remove them? This would need to be mirrored in the backend code to allow such a possibility. Maybe some method to choose trusted people like escrow would use perhaps.
I have considered ideas about using approval voting weight (like witnesses) to pick people who have the "power to flag". It gets very tricky to scale and to hold people accountable, especially with incumbents.
Another method that has been adopted is random "meta moderation" similar to how slashdot.org does it.
Random jury pooling.
I'm absolutely fine with your first paragraph, it's just that we have identified a number of issues with the current implementation, this is indisputable I would say. The argument appears to be that things will level out over time. I believe we do not have that time because it appears to be the same argument used to defend current Capitalist society; that the 1% will benefit the 99% by the "trickle down effect". This has been clearly shown to not be the case as wealth is concentrated more and more to the top 1%. I believe this effect is currently being played out, and that this will lose our user base before any theoretical trickling occurs - this is my concern.
"I think that those who are against down votes don't like the feeling of punishment that comes with them. Whether something is theft or not depends upon the consensus of property rights."
I'm against down votes because it doesn't appear to work on top of this reason. The consensus of property rights could be provided by the consensus of the community in the Court/delayed payment model I sketched out, or something different, but the main point is that the larger community confers these rights.
i love the idea of privatizing and commoditizing thoughts as property rights..I wrote a thesis on it many decades ago and here it is..hats off to all concerned
Especially 'subjective'or discretionary punishment w/o explanation.
I suggest highlighting the important pars like on zero-hedge, I find it too long to read.
I think "most people will treat each-other with respect" simply because that's the type of interaction they want from the other person(s).
In my experience, it is a rare individual that will only respect others under a threat of death. And that's using the term "respect" very loosely.
There still is zero respect from this person (now being held at gunpoint), they are simply feigning respect to save their live ... so they can pounce on your ass as soon as that gun is put down. ;)
Nice thing about steem, we aren't talking bout life and death so it doesn't matter who shoots first.
What if we introduce a n^2 like curve for secret down votes? (Where the power of the down votes amplifies for the last down voters!)
Might be a good idea.
could you elaborate? what you mean by secret down votes?
I thought reputation was a vesting system designed to inhibit gaming of the platform.
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