I remember when steem started a year ago, the insane inflation, the reward curve, the 2 year lock in period,etc...we've come a long way.
I want to thank the steem developers who have taken all the feedbacks from the community and have done an excellent job to prepare steem for primetime..
However there is still one fundamental problem in the way steem works in my opinion :
Wealthy individuals/organizations can silence anything on the platform and remove monetary rewards from anyone.
Some argue that steemit is censorship free because content cannot be deleted from the blockchain. It is to some extent but there are other ways you can censor content indirectly. One of which is to cut funding, basically the type of censorship youtube is involved in and that we are trying to prevent.
If you search 'censorship steemit' on youtube you will find dozens of users complain that their posts have effectively been demonetized and that steemit is no different from youtube. Censorship is alive and well on steemit, because your rewards havn't yet been taken away from you doesn't mean it isn't happening to others.
For the reasons outlined above I would like to propose a change to the downvote function. Currently it is stake based which means users's downvote power is relative to their steem power.
This makes the whole system very vulnerable and at the mercy of any wealthy entity willing to attack the network.
That's why I think the downvote function should be modified from stake based to consensus based. A post would need to have majority consensus against it for it to be downvoted. This is where reputation, account age,etc...comes in.
Why only use consensus mechanism to downvote and not upvote?
Assume this scenario. Mark Zuckerberg buys 99% of the steem supply with the intend to disrupt and hurt the platform.
He first uses his voting power to allocate himself a huge portion of the reward pool. This would have basically very little effect on steemit, the price of steem would have adjusted accordingly. The community would be using only 1% of the existing tokens but there would be no real disruption on the platform as the dollar value would have increased a lot due to Zuckerberg buying it all up and steemians having to share only 1% of the supply.
After failing at disrupting the platform Zuckerberg attempts a new strategy. Instead of upvoting himself he decides to downvote everybody else on the platform. Now however this creates a real mess, the vast majority of users have stopped earning rewards on the platform, complain about censorship are through the roof, steem users are left helpless,..
What is the lesson here? The lesson is that a rich person/organization willing to attack the network would only be able to do so with the downvote function which is why a consensus mechanism is only required for downvotes.
Another important takeaway is that self voting does not really hurt the platform, unless everyone does it of course. But even then it wouldn't really hurt it per se rather would change its purpose.
There is no bad or good way to use your steem power, some people will be selfish, some rich kids will up vote pokemon stuff all day long, some advertisers will vote up their shitty products,etc.. people will use their steem power in many different way just like in society people earn in many different ways.
Everyone who owns steem power supports the network simply by owning a share in it and they should be able to use it in whatever way without being downvoted. Steem is a self regulating system where users who support steem by powering up rise up and those who don’t lose influence.
The ‘disagreement on reward’ thing is plain stupid, imagine if in society it was normal to beat people up when you disagree with them, that’s effectively what steemit encourages with this.
Only thing with wide consensus such as trolling, pedophelia,offensive content,etc…should be downvoted.
There are many other issues aside from censorship that comes with stake based downvoting.
Scalability
Only a handful of people have the ability to really moderate the site. As the platform grows it will be increasingly difficult for these individuals to moderate, in other words there won’t be enough eye balls to moderate everything.
Trust
We the community need to trust that those with influence are doing a proper job moderating and that they are not biased in their decision. Unfortunately they have proven many times that we can not trust them, if you give someone too much power he is ultimately going to abuse it.
Reputation damage
When a rich individual can ruin your reputation with only a few votes the reputation score becomes meaningless.
Centralisation
Whenever a user downvote content he is losing potential rewards.
This means that only a few people are in the business of moderation. Those people have been delegated whale power in order to moderate the platform. Similar to curation guilds basically. Only a few individuals get to decide what should be down voted, this is very problematic
We need consensus with at least 80-90% majority in order for a post to be down voted.
Steemit proud itself on being a community based website but is it really?
So far the argument I’ve heard against, is that it will reduce the utility of steem power. I’d would argue that it won’t, it may actually give people an extra incentive to buy and give steem power more value.
The proposal is not necessarily to create 1 steemian = 1 downvote but to bake consensus in.
Downvoting power could still be relative to steem power but there would need to be majority consensus before a post can be downvoted.
I was also contemplating the idea of having a moderation board. Basically a list of posts ranked from the most downvoted to the least downvoted ( in number term ) And all users would be able to easily participate in the moderation of the platform.
Anyway let me know how you feel about this.