I wrote about this last fall when the issue was bots piling on their favorite authors.
Although the reason is different today we still need shorts. Why and How? Keep reading....
Here is the post from last year
Shorts more benevolent than made out to be
While the popular image of shorts is an evil pessimist.(see pic below) Shorts help make the market efficient. If rewards are too high for a given post it doesn't help anyone. The problem used to be piling on popular authors. Now it's self voting. Either way....
Basically we need more shorting.
Last year I writes:
the flag doesn't work because it is linked to reputation. No reason to trash a rep because a bunch of bots upvoted a post. We need a downvote that only impacts post vakue.
I proposed a few ways to do this last year (read the original) but now I have more ideas given hf19.
We need three main changes:
- a downvotes only button, 2) a change to curation, and 3) shorting encouragement.
1. shorting shouldn't impact reputation.
This is the same as my old post. If you think it's overvalued you should be able to short without trashing a reputation. We need flag which hits rep and downvotes and a plane downvotes that doesn't hit the reputation. This way people won't take it so personally.
2. You should receive curation rewards for shorting.
Currently shorts use a vote and foreground curation rewards this is an altruistic behavior we can't count on. In the original post I recommended reverse curation. If the payout ends below what you shorted it at you would benefit. This might be hard to implement as it would have to come from the broader reward pool but still worth it in my view. We probably see shorting bots trying to capture this reward.
3. Shorting could recharge voting power!
Now after the hf19 change, voting power is in short supply perhaps shorting could allow for another vote by recharging voting power. This would encourage shoes and align self interest. When people are low on voting power they'll downvotes some easy targets.
Benefits of this approach.
1. This addresses self voting issue.
If people need to short to self vote themselves they would likely undo others self votes. When paired with the first idea on curation self votes are most likely to not go higher after a short resulting in lost curation rewards. So they should be the easiest for those looking to recharge voting power.
2. This will improve trending
Encouraging shorting should improve content on trending by getting influence to the minnows on what not to show. This should be nearly as powerful as increasing minnow influence on what to show
