"People need to stinking start flagging. "Negative-voting" (as refered in the whitepaper). If a self-voted post or comment is making more that you feel appropriate - flag. Don't complain. The entire steem system is founded on the principle that everyone is able to use their vests however they choose to make payouts align with their perception of value."
I agree that this is ultimately the solution. The problem I see is back to a sort of prisoner's dilemma - who's going to waste their voting power on the flagging, a thankless job with no curation rewards?
I suggested a free number of flags per day, or a separate flag voting power here:
Ironically, it got flagged (and not much interest.) Another option would be to create flagging rewards similar to curation, but that could obviously go wrong.
Who is going to waste their power?
Users who want their vests to be worth something - if the front page is full of spam getting tons of steem, that doesn't really bode well for the value of the platform as a whole.
The problem is that is way too abstracted from the daily minds of voters. I like the free flags per day, but the problem with that is that now people are incentivized to find as many posts as free flags and downvote. There are definitely problems there too.
Flagging rewards might be better. I am in favor of getting rid of curation all together and just doing a simple upvote downvote system. Idk.
This is uncharted waters.
Good points. I still like to browse the introduceyourself posts and upvote new users who make an effort to verify themselves and make a good introduction. My small way of contributing in the spare time I have. I discovered a user who was spamming the same introduction posts (with virtually no content and just one picture) over 20 times spanning many days. I had a little dilemma, because I had warned them multiple times to stop reposting or I would flag as spam, but I didn't want to waste ALL of my voting power just to end one users spam. After several days of more reposts I finally decided to just flag them because it was just spam pure and simple, trying to suck up bots that still autovote introduceyourself posts. Anyway, probably lost ~10 SP from flagging them, but what are you gonna do? Still not sure what the solution to this problem is.
(Gratuitous self-upvoting because I think this is definitely an important topic.)
You point out the real pain point when it comes to downvotes. They use up your power and you do not earn curation. Like you said you missed out on 10sp...
Sure there are the long term incentives (what untimatly got you to flag in the first place) at play with downvotes but those incentives are far removed from the immediate incentives of curation rewards.
There must be a solution here. Curation rewards for flags? How would that work? No power for flags, that has problems. 3 free flags a day? That has its own misaligned incentives. I am not sure.
Thanks for the response!
Cheers