There seems to be an #informationwar regarding if DOWNVOTES are GOOD or BAD for the steemit eco-system.
The following is an excerpt from an ongoing conversation with 
That's great! At what point do you think steemit will be competitive with youtube or facebook or reddit?
Steem most likely never will. It will remain a niche. But, even having 1% of FB's traffic would be tremendous for the platform.
Crypto itself is not user friendly. Steem itself is super complicated compared to other projects out there.
On the surface it doesn't seem significantly more complicated than Bitcoin.
The main difference is that the reward-pool is distributed by upvotes instead of randomized code-breaking by ASICs.
People don't want complicated things. And being a copycat to FB will not get you anywhere because it's already been done. Why go on Steem when it is just FB?
There are scandals and complaints about facebook and youtube nearly every other week. Steemit could be scooping up these disaffected users if they had the right feature set. Heck, I originally became interested in it when I ran across some videos posted to d.tube. I thought d.tube was a solution to all the "demonitization" and "shadow banning" everyone was crying about on youtube, but now, I mean, the fact that you can only get meaningful upvotes for 7 days (?) and the fact that your re-steem privileges can be disabled by a single downvote (?) paired with the steemcleaners welcome wagon (downvote) if you decide to re-post your old stuff, this all makes d.tube/steemit much less attractive than I first imagined (and no playlist options).
Youtube and facebook became giants because content creators could MONETIZE their pages based on VIEWS. It didn't matter if the post was 2+ years old, as long as it was still generating page-views, it could make some percentage of the advertising revenue served to that page.
We already know the winning formula, the appeal of steemit is (should be) that it is a fair and decentralized, transparent system.
If Libra does come to pass, there's no point to Steem at all except for some philosophical reasons.
What? Do you think being fair, decentralized and transparent are merely incidental concerns?
And look past the whole "getting paid" aspect. There exist people getting paid shitposting nonsense on places like Instagram, etc. You just don't see the rewards in the open like on Steem.
People are going to post stuff you think is wrong/stupid. That's why you should simply MUTE/BLOCK them. Whatever happened to "live and let live"?
That's a perfect example. The OWNERS filed a COMPLAINT.
They didn't. Steemians approached them on their FB praising them only to find out they don't have an account on Steem. Then, the community took it upon their own hands.
Wow, they got new fans and they got mad about it?
Here's the main problem with downvotes. Imagine that I start a band, say it's a cover band of some really popular band, then some other cover band that does the same thing as my band gets jealous of my band's growing popularity and gets all of their fans (who happen to have more money) to downvote all of my band's songs, basically making them invisible.
Nobody should be able to do that.
Imagine that steemit gets pretty popular somehow magically and grows to a modest 2 million active users. Now, this isn't very far fetched, just imagine the Chinese government decides it wants to de facto censor any negative comments about communism. They've got the money, they've got the motivation, and thanks to downvotes, they've got the perfect weapon.
Wouldn't it be nice if this kind of big-money-censorship was impossible?
Every payout reduces the pool, (just like when you run the shower, it "decreases" the municipal water supply) but it does not reduce the value of the pool.
Inflation (or adding to the circulating supply) without buyers exceeding the sellers is exactly what we have right now: low prices. The whales, Steemit Inc., and hustlers are selling faster than people generating demand.
You can instantly dry up liquidity by making all rewards 100% steem-power.
Steemit Inc has enough market power to stabilize SBD, right?
Why not drop SBD and just use that same market power to stabilize steem instead?
STEEM has one of the highest inflation rate among all projects. It will eventually level off, but it's still at a whooping 8.24% for 2019. This meant there will be 26.7M+ STEEM minted this year.
All that means is we need to grow the steem userbase by 8.24% per year.
The total supply has nothing to do with inflation. Just like QE1 QE2 and QE3 created trillions of dollars out of thin air, but inflation barely rippled, why? Because the new money was sequestered in vaults (not liquid).
That's quite a bit of demand that needs to be filled.
We need to pay people ad sharing revenue for pageviews, fairly and transparently and for way longer than 7 days.
Look at a list of currencies with that rate of inflation or higher. You won't find a first world country on there.
Well does the USA count as a "first world country" in your book?
This looks like slightly more that an 8% increase in total dollars in existence...
WHALESHARES FAILED BECAUSE IT'S TOO COMPLICATED.
If you know Steem, Whaleshares is just a couple of more steps. They got rid of downvotes over there and there have been some interesting behaviors at display.
It seems like you're significantly over-simplifying the reasons for this "failure".
Essential sites for (new) steemit users:
check anybody's steemit activity log
check anybody's steemit activity patterns
offical steemit etiquette guide
identify the most influential steemit users
advice for minnows and plankton
are you tired of $0.00 rewards? (balance denominated in SBD)
are you tired of $0.00 rewards? also check
Also, set your rewards to 100% steem power and you'll get a cool steem logo next to all your posts!!
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Your scathing critique is requested.
REGARDING THE STEEM-BOUNTY,
Please leave your suggestions about how you would rescue steemit.
(1) My primary proposal is to remove all downvoting and set the MUTE feature to be reciporical, so if you MUTE someone, you also become invisible to them.
(2) Then we should give everyone advertising revenue sharing based on PAGE VIEWS, in addition to the upvotes FOREVER, just like youtube and facebook (not just 7 days).
(3) THEN, we should launch a FREE-SPEECH campaign and scoop up all the disaffected youtubers and shadowbanned facebookers!!!! There are literally millions of them!!! We've only got 30,000 total active users (and that number is declining)!!!
Please share your thoughts and suggestions and criticisms and disagreements!!
