Have you ever felt the same psychological stress spending gold in a video game? Likely not, but actually going to the store and giving them your credit card to buy the game has a much different impact.
There are degrees of loss aversion people feel on a spectrum. I've seen studies that show hard currency is worse, then debit cards because people think about the hard money in their bank, then credit cards, then the "wave over this spot to pay", then game tokens (war craft gold, etc), etc, etc. I see it as all on the spectrum. Even though people are "paying" (I use that word because you had something, then you don't have it anymore because you spend it to get an outcome you want) in voting percentage, it's not shown in the interface currently. Most users (you and I are power users, I'm thinking about all my friends and family I'd like to get to join up) know nothing about voting percentages or how they change over time. They probably don't care either.
Oh cmon, you can't say change is always something people don't like :)
Very true, thanks for calling me on it. I wrote my reply in a rush and didn't express myself very well. I was meaning more along the lines of the generalization cliche of "people fear change."
does it sound like my post is offering something more complicated
That was my impression, but I probably didn't spend enough time reading it through carefully. Again though, I'm thinking in terms of the psychological effect of spending (even if you see the tokens as non-valuable things, if they lead to curation rewards, they become valuable things).
After each vote, the UI can dynamically update to show your remaining tokens.
That made me think we'd lose some of the "no microtipping" part of Steemit we enjoy right now.
Will the proposed Steemit changes include UI changes for normal users? If they don't, then I'm less concerned about them than I would be about UI changes that would add complexity for normal users. I do think simplicity is important and I think you and I are in agreement about that. It may be that a token based system makes a lot more sense than a percentage (even if, under the hood, it's still actually a percentage). How it's displayed matters, but I prefer keeping complexity away from people who may not really care about it (i.e. the "normal users").