But consider this: if a whale misbehaves (as you described), as the system is transparent, another whale will come along and negate the misbehaving one.
And when I say "misbehave" I mean wiping out your payout completely, not reducing it by 20-30%. This is all subjective, there can't be strict rules separating valid opinions from abuse, but it's not crazy to assume that most (not all) people will behave responsibly.
The only assumptions we make here are these:
- there are more benevolent whales than malicious ones
- the benevolent whales will have the incentive to track down the malicious ones
Even if delusional pollyana optimism rules the day here, and people upvote things for superficial reasons, and then fail to down-vote the superficial or delusional but "positive," the downvote feature is still essential. It's negative feedback, which increases Bayesian optimality or "intelligence."
Yes i hope our whales are more of the Benevolent type but have seen a number of cases where the flag was done at the last minute which could be considered spiteful.