I just fail to see how this change attracts new users in any way... and that should be our focus. Attracting and keeping users, this change likely does the opposite of that in my opinion.
It's been proven that downvotes won't be used responsibly, even when they had a cost.
The same shop. The same chef. The same ingredients. The same taste. The same price. But now, we are wondering how our pizza-shop will be affected if we start cutting it into 6 pieces instead of 8 pieces
Is it going to attract new customers - no
Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no
Will it change the earnings of our pizza shop - no
red button, redistribution, changing ratio authors/curators are not going to create anything measurable. Maybe it can even affect negatively because people will be wondering why on Earth those people are discussing this topic when they have at least 100 more important problems?
Shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. SMTs and communities are the only shot out of this mess at this point, though I think these changes will be a net negative, so even worse than just shuffling the deck chairs.
MIRA and ten thousand 'top' witnesses might be able to help. Decentralization is the cure for centralization, and counters the problem of centralization of tokens that is the source of many of the problems Steem has.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
Again, nothing but math...
Stolen from @arcange:
As you can see, the median payout is 0,10 $.
Half of the posts earn less than 0,10 $ per post.
Not a single new user will come here to (*most probably) earn 0,10 $ per day. It's maybe 50 $ per year?!
However, there is something completely different that Steemit could do.
I'll send them the official proposal concerning this :D
"Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no"
I have seen quite a chilling effect on many that I follow. A few of which have been "chased" off and no longer post and have powered down. But your other 2 points I 100% agree. Before they went dark they posted several instances where simple malice were the reason for their flags. Initial content was flagged, they (content creator's) objected, waves of more flags ensued. It had nothing to do w/bad content after the initial flag, which is obviously subjective to begin with...
I think that one of the big things driving away users is new users seeing "shitty" content receiving a big part of the reward shares due to abuse of bots and similar. A downvote pool can be used to discourage bot usage on content which does not deserve to be on the hot or trending page. This guarantees the "quality" of those pages and thus attracts new users in my opinion.
Who defines what's "quality"?
Your premise is that users will use downvotes responsibly even though 3 years of history contradicts that belief.
I don't believe that all users do, but I believe that a significant part of the stakeholders which have significant interest in the platform will try to make a responsible decision for the platform to avoid bad content.
Having, as proposed, a pool similar to 10-25% is not enough for significant abuse (as discussed in the post) but allows the community to action more easily.
If the effect it is going to have is going to be more positive than negative is going to be something we will see.
We'd be stupid to not try though.
No we'd be stupid to try it instead of waiting for SMTs and communities and trying it there first.
By the way, you realize that if only a few people downvote (likely) their downvotes are going to allocate the entire downvote pool, making their votes significantly more impactful than their stake, right?
The downvote pool is a manapool and not a reward pool.
So it's individual.
Also, communities are not going to solve it, they are more a frontend story. And SMTs might as well need it.
Communities and SMTs likely go hand in hand. They solve it becuase steemit becomes part of the base layer and the rewarding layer and content discovery is done within communities where moderators etc can use downvotes or flags and they can set their own economics for each community.
Again the fundamental question is, will these changes bring in users or chase users away and it seems very likely it is going to be more of the second one.
Well, there are objective parameters by which you can determine that.
I could give you a dozen examples.
Photography, art, music. There are objective parameters in each category that determine what is quality and what is not.
Even when concerning quality of text....
But thats not the question really. What i find important is the CHOICE...
The most important change Steem needs is that we introduce choice into our content placement.
Maybe the community is stupid and has a shitty taste in content but it should be able to make that choice for itself. Something which it does not right now.
But here i completely agree. If there was a way to mask who the downvoter is on a post that would do the trick.
Then you would actually see people acting the way they should. Based on their personal convictions.
If you could encrypt, somehow, the downvoter on a post i guarantee you that bad apples like Bernie, FTG, chbartist... etc would be booted off the platform by the time the community realizes that the system works... I would bet every penny of crypto i have that would happen.
Unfortunately it wont and youre left with an idea that only works if youre incapable of assessing human behavior.
But there is not, because "transparency"! Which will make every downvote personal and not do what they are designed to do at all. Which means, it won't work.
You keep bringing up the "whale experiment" like it was the same thing. It was nothing like what is being proposed here. The whale experiment was a couple of whales that set up to auto downvote (negate) any votes that were over X amount of vests. All they did was put a cap on influence. It couldn't last because eventually people split their stake into different accounts to stay under that max threshold. Completely different than what is being proposed now.
Not sure that would do anything... but yes that is how "quality" will be defined. One man's trash is another man's quality. Though more likely it will be people upvting friends no matter what they put out and downvoting those they dislike no matter what they put out. Please tell me how that is proof of brain?!
'can' is not will. But few users will deploy their downvotes in a way devs have modeled. Most people don't flag, and won't. Most people that do don't do so for reasons we want them to, but because they're pissed off at what someone said.
That's why this comment will be flagged. That's all the proof we need that this will only make things worse.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
Just wait until srednas einreb and cgn are succeed in getting him or his many other targets to quit, and they move onto their next target...which could be you. Many people are quitting. The people behind it could be trying to push the latest product Dan is working on, in which case they won't be happy until we are all purged. @Vandeberg 's proposal is causing more people to powerdown and flee as the company is refusing to address existing problems that harm the community.
Actually 3 years of history have proven that down votes won't be used responsibly. It will be 95% personal.