What's Happening?
Downvotes take up voting power, but do not provide any monetary gains. That means that in order for anybody to be motivated to downvote, the desire to help the community must exceed the possible monetary reward. This works very well for minnows, but dolphins and whales are increasingly motivated to downvote less. I'll provide a scenario:
A whale like @thejohalfiles will likely not make more than 10 votes a day at 100% voting power, 20 at 50%, etc. But one of his votes is worth more than $100 dollars.
So he would get a feeling of satisfaction from helpeing the steemit community if he downvoted, but would that feeling outweight $130? He could reap curation rewards instead, right?
People like @markboss have spambots running all day, but nobody is motivated to downvote his posts. Why would they? They would simply waste their voting power, because there are so many posts and no rewards for downvoting. That's why so many users who are making worthless content are able to make worthless content—because of the lack of a monetary reward for downvoting.
How Can We Solve This?
Downvotes should be rewarded just like upvotes. The first person to vote (either up and downvotes) gets the most money, and you get more rewards if you downvote after 30 minutes have passed. Downvotes have curation rewards paid out after 7 days just like upvotes.
I understand that the money doesn't magically appear. I think that downvoting rewards should be generated just like curation rewards, but then pooled and distributed to the downvoters based on voting weight and power as not to give any money to the poster. So if one whale downvotes a post at 100% voting weight and power and contributes $200 to the pool and a minnow downvotes at 100% weight and power contributes $0.02 to the pool, each shall receive $100.01.
It may sound as if this is not in the self-interest of the downvoters, but each subsequent voter shall downvote to cash in on the last person's reward. This results in large pools of people accumulating to downvote content. This causes the downvote pool reward to increase exponentially, so it may be possible to profit.
Any Possible Repercussions
The whales are going to be the leaders of this downvote movement, obviously. In general we can trust that whales will be concerned with the health of the community and will only downvote when they see fit. There is also no monetary incentive for whales to downvote instead of upvote good posts.
However, I can foresee that this may cause chaos with good posts being downvoted due to politics between whales. When a whale downvotes, minnows will come flocking to him and mirror his every move. This may possibly be used as a tactic by whales to ruin competitors.
There is also a possibility that "downvote pools" may arise when the supply of normal trolls and spammers have all been downvoted out of steemit. These "downvote pools" would be trash accounts that serve no purpose but to make shitposts. These shitposts would then be downvoted just to read pool rewards. I do not believe the "downvote pools" will ever pose a large threat to steemit, however, because wealthier accounts are less monetarily motivated to do it than minnow accounts.
If you have any suggestions to improve this idea, please tell me!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
I don't agree that downvoting needs to have a network-mediated reward. Incentivizing downvoting without oversight has a great potential to make Steem a toxic place. Downvotes can be laid on any post or for any reason, you can imagine the effect of incentivizing them broadly.
Steemcleaners has a moderated/human driven incentivization system where those who find, report, investigate, and mitigate abuse are rewarded.
But Steemcleaners doesn't have to be the only game in town, as far as rewarding abuse mitigation goes.
Some whale like thejohalfiles is not going to downvote a stupid bot like markboss at 100% voting weight. He has NO monetary reward in doing so. If he downvoted 10 of markboss's posts at his full voting power and weight, markboss's account would go negative reputation and would be pretty much useless to him. But thejohalfiles would just be wasting more than $1300 in upvotes because markboss will just make a new spam account! See, downvotes should be rewarded
If downvotes were rewarded, hundreds of minnows would jump on the train when a whale downvotes. This would effectively sink every spam account out there. Whales are concerned with the health of steemit as it is their income, so they wouldn't downvote good posts
there is little incentive to downvote good comments. At best, some stupid minnows might do so. The whales and dolphins would receive far less than their vote's full value if downvotes were rewarded and pooled
Its described well in The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Search up "the invisible hand"
Downvoting needs rewards
I doubt that most people would downvote good content because it gives them enemies on steemit. Those who make good posts almost always have more leverage than the spammers do on steemit
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