Anonymous Downvote Bot as an Alternative to Downvote Pool

There has been great debate recently over changing steem’s economic model. It is nice to get this type of response from the community.

Part of the proposed changes involve creating a downvote pool so individuals do not have to sacrifice losing voting mana when downvoting content. There are many downvote worthy posts on Steem that do not get downvoted for a variety of reasons. The discussion around this topic has primarily centered on the idea that individuals do not downvote because it is not economically favorable for them to do it. While that is true, I do not think it is the main reason individuals chose to hold back a downvote.

I believe the main reason is it opens up the person who is doing the downvoting to retaliation. No one wants everything they have worked for on this blockchain to be blown up because of a flag war. It just isn’t worth the risk. Adding a downvote pool is not going to solve this issue/risk. Anonymous downvoting would and in theory, we can do it today.

How would we do it today you ask? Great question. With an anonymous downvote bot! The general idea is users who identify downvote worthy content would submit a request for the content to be downvoted using an encrypted memo by adding a # in front of the link to the post to be downvoted. The downvote bot could then downvote the content on maybe a random delay so people could not figure out who submitted the request to downvote the content.

The bot would need its own Steem power. An obvious source to me is a delegation from Steemit Inc that is just currently sitting idle. If not them then I guess delegations from the community.

Anonymous downvoting would have its own issues and possible abuses so the bot would need to be coded to limit these issues. For instance, maybe a single user can only submit a certain number of downvote requests in a given time span or they can only downvote another user so many times in a given time period. Something like that would possibly help curb abuse. I am sure other things would work better. We are a smart community. I am sure someone can figure out the right balance.

A community driven downvote bot (something like Hive account@communitywatch) would also empower minnows with the ability to downvote content that their normal Steem power would pale in comparison to. And since minnows make up the largest percentage of users, there would be a lot of watchdogs out there to clean up the blockchain.

Details would certainly need to be worked out but I am interested to hear what people think about this idea? I think it would encourage users to downvote if they feel the content is downvote worthy without the fear of retaliation.

I would love if there are other solutions out there that do not require anonymous actions, but I just do not see any other way.

Lets discuss in the comments section.