The downvote pool is madness. Informationwar and others already get downvoted on their comments and posts as it is due to just a few people who don't like us. This just gives more power to those who have money to silence others or take away their SP earned on a post. Downvotes already have a cost and people weigh the option of downvoting being worth it or not because that is an upvote they are giving up. Giving a pool of free daily downvotes just encourages MORE downvoting, not SMARTER downvoting/curation.
A mechanism for smarter downvoting would be like having a council of people who can agree upon something, and having an ability to use Smart Contracts to actually have mods or something that actually gets "free downvotes" to downvote abuse and bad stuff. Simply giving everyone more free downvotes doesn't actually solve any problems. There is no thought or structure to such a thing, its just "here is free downvotes to use". I would agree having free downvotes would be good if such a council or witness council would be the ones in charge of assigning trustworthy people the status of an "Oracle" or "Mod" who actually gets the free downvotes.
I am 100% powering down my Steem right now, because if these changes really come through Steem in the long run isn't going to be worth much.
Think of telling a friend who knows nothing about Steem that he can buy 100,000 USD worth of Steem, come to the platform and get a 50% return on just pressing an upvote button on ANY post and he can make it back in a year or two. If you truly can get 50% curation rewards you could literally buy a few hundred thousand USD of Steem, upvote anything without any critical thinking and make 50k to 100k USD a year and retire from your day job. It doesn't make any sense.
Does that not sound like a sort of a scheme or something shady? Do you think your friend would believe you that it would be a long lasting platform where anyone can purchase crypto and upvote "anything" and get paid more than his job makes? It doesn't make sense and won't work long term.
It encourages people to just blow a bunch of money on Steem, upvote "anything" which will clog everything up more with pointless shitposts being upvoted or autoupvoted by whales , who are here just to siphon off liquid Steem to sell for profit.
Why do we want to turn Steem blockchain into a place where people can buy in with a bunch of money and make a bunch of money for NO effort.
I think you need to think more deeply about this and the ramifications of such a change.
I think you are misinterpreting some elemental things here.
The rewards are not and will not be 50% of your SP per year. I don't know the exact ROI you can get by voting only yourself but I think it's around 18% or something like that.
And after the possible change to a 50/50 reward system your ROI won't skyrocket to 50%, it just means that the curation rewards will be 50% from upvoted value, 50% for the author and 50% curation. The ROI will still be lower than 50% and that by a lot xD
And sure there will be more downvotes, if ppl see something they don't like it's very possible that they will downvote it after the change and I think that is good because now a lot of trash doesn't get doenvoted because it costs money to downvote and for most ppl it's that they are more generous with their upvotes instead of downvoting something.
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With the current 75/25 payout the ROI per year may be 18%. If it was 50/50 per year it would be between 36% and possibly 50%. You get more if you upvote something before others, and within a certain time window.
It couldbe possible to get a 50% return.
If anything it would be a doubling from 18% to 36% then lets say. That is still quite a chunk of money. There are many people in the crypto world who could buy 200,000 USD of Steem, upvote any random posts just to make money. That would earn them 72,000 USD a year for no effort.
A no effort community filled with people buying Steem just to make profit would not hold up in the long term.
Giving free downvotes to everyone will result in more downvoting, not smarter downvoting or better curating. I would be willing to vote for "mods" or "a council" who actually gets the free downvotes. Those people could be voted for just like how witnesses are voted for.
We need a community fork
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It's simple. They are screaming oppression, establishment, big corporations, blah, blah.
It turns out that their own system becomes just that.
Because they were playing decentralisation game for 3 years, they can't stop.
Solution - keep repeating the same
Real solution, become centralised but smart. Bring some useful projects and excellent content creators and pay them big money.
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Yeah, the guys that have controversial posts are likely to get opinion flagged more, but also keep in mind that every upvote becomes a lot more powerful and this place is filled with unintended consequences. The votes you'll have in your community will be worth more. It'll balance out. Equilibrium is a very strong universal force.
What if you had some sort of 'downvote guidelines'? Those would be tied to a pool of SP delegated to a bot account. The bot could be governed by a jury system (a vote on dpoll maybe). If you invoke a jury(whitelisted maybe) and win, you get the downvotes erased plus a certain percentage. If your invocation is BS and the downvote is deserved, the bot downvotes you even more for wasting people's time. Each juror can get a small upvote from the bot on their vote submission. Jurors can voted in or out based upon their adherence to the downvote guidelines. In this you have a community driven system that could overcome abuse or exploits. To seed the pool, the bot could also be a witness vote proxy that tracked how much witnesses delegated to it. People supporting the jury system can let the bot vote on their behalf and then witnesses would be forced to delegate more SP in order to compete for votes. This would also have the side effect of making the top witness have the biggest SP investment in the platform. Perhaps there could also be a way to incentivize everyone else to delegate to it as well.
@steemflagrewards?
I think it will balance out if there was a sort of witness council where actual mods could be appointed who have the downvote power. And the mods have to be rotated out every so often with other people.
Something like that would be a lot better. On reddit for example having mods who are always in charge leads to tyranny and censorship, as shown by /r/politics and /r/bitcon and /r/news and /r/worldnews. If those mods were rotated out or voted out it would be a lot better.
I would be willing to vote for mods who have the free downvotes, same as how we vote for witnesses.
One of the biggest issues with virtue signaling is that its usually a facade to hide the truth. Forcing people to put their money where their mouth is evaporates most virtue signalers instantly. In an environment where something like steem has mass adoption then opinion flagging will not be nearly as high as you might think.
I really doubt that, outside of a few invincible whales, we will see about the same levels of opinion flagging we see now.