This is not as deep a dive as 
While a lot of people don't seem to understand the need to downvote and see it as more tinkering with the economics that will favor whales, that is not really the case at all. What people have to remember is that to balance the "wisdom of the crowd", negatives have to be voiced also and currently on Steem, there is very little incentive to speak up negatively.
Have you ever reviewed a restaurant or product an a website with a star rating? Do you give everything 5 stars? Unlikely. Some people think that this is like voting but it isn't quite because a 1 star rating is negative but a vote is always positive, regardless of the weight. It might be 10% or 100%, it doesn't matter, it is a positive for the post.
To actually have a sensitive rating system (and voting on Steem is a rating system), it requires a spectrum of potential from positive to negative. This doesn't happen now because there is no benefit in downvoting, and because of the stigma held around it, most won't do it even if they have the available voting power because they do not want the feeling of doing harm or the repercussions of whoever was downvoted.
While people might be sick and tired of seeing "whales self-vote", they are not tire enough to start flagging those accounts because they do not want to be the only ones to do so and currently, they likely would be the only ones. This is not a very good system for decentralized regulation as is.
Normalizing downvoting in the community and creating the understanding that the Steem is not yours until in your wallet will go a long way to cleaning up the abuse on the platform because pretty much everyone will be able to have a say and, with a slight curve, the more highly rewarded content is, the more effect a downvote has on it.
What this means is that those who are boosting nonsense posts to the moon in Trending are much, much easier to lower and with a few free downvotes that returns that value to the pool, there will be many more willing to take at least the earnings off them, if not force a bit of a loss. In short order, the content that gets boosted will change form as the risk of loss is too high unless the content deserves to be there.
From what I have read, a lot of the concern around free downvotes surrounds a few large accounts who even now don't mind letting the flags flow. These accounts are always a risk to earnings, no matter what the algorithms are however, if the crowd decides, with free flags those accounts won't be earning another Steem on the platform from content creation as there is a much more voting power in the crowd.
Currently, there is very little incentive to get involved, later that might change. If this downvote pool and curve had been in place when Haejin was getting flagged, he would never have become a whale as the small group who did flag would have been able to take all earnings to zero, every day for eternity. What this means is that all of the downvoted value goes back into the pool for redistribution to all the content that wasn't flagged.
While I am not technical enough to go into all of the algorithmic details, I do think that the system needs to change and when it changes, we will be able to see if behaviors change on the platform too. All the hypothesizing in the world is unlikely to fully uncover how such a diverse group of users will behave under these proposed changes. It could be that not much changes at all, it could be that it is much worse than now, it could be that it is much better than now.
I do not think that suddenly everyone is downvoting willy-nilly because for the most part, people aren't that way inclined and if you remember, the most active voting SP on the platform are in the Orca and Dolphin classes. That means that while the whales pack an individual punch, the wisdom of the crowd actually lays in a much wider distribution of accounts and with a curve, the thousands of minnows have much more of a distributive say too. I do predict that there will be more flagging though and in time, it will reshape the way people act on the platform and potentially make it a much healthier and realistic environment.
Going back to an online product review, those that have participated and given a negative review (1-2 stars) may have had an economic impact on the success of the company reviewed. Did it stop them giving a star? The problem is that people thing it is a "if you don't have something nice to say, say nothing at all", but that is not the case here. The idea of the wisdom of the crowd is to be able to trust in the negatives as well as the positives. If everyone keeps walking past the holes and not warning others there is a hole, people keep falling in.
While I do agree that there is a great deal of immaturity on this platform currently, we are also trying to build an environment where we can mature into a community and economy that has the capabilities to handle all kinds of abuse.
Ignoring it only gets us so far.
People act intentionally almost exclusively on incentive and currently, there is very little short-term incentive to clean up the environment and instead, there is an immediate cost to those who might. As I see it, the content evaluation is only one part of this, the more important side of it all is the development of maturity within the community - including around the discourse of delicate topics that people feel emotional about.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]