RE: Learning from History: One of Steem's "Grand Challenges"
Use of downvotes by large stakeholders for posts that are egregiously overvalued
An idea I had that I've been reluctant to openly propose is that we could have the frontend filter out posts that an account has downvoted from their own view of a trending page, so while they individually use their downvotes to "clean up" the trending page they see that results in downvotes organically accumulating on overvalued posts.
Another way to build this capability would be to establish and support communities where authors are expected to build on each others' ideas and to share a percentage of rewards with the authors of the earlier posts. (i.e. like YouTube's "reply videos", but augmented by rewards-sharing.)
Maybe something like a "book club" style discussion group community would be helpful. (Or maybe figure out a good way for an LLM to be a discussion facilitator for that kind of post?) It's my impression that writing good content and cultivating community discussions are different skills. So maybe ways to cultivate living discussions that beneficiary some rewards to the original creator of the discussed topic would be something worth exploring.
Something similar can be achieved by muting these accounts. As @remlaps says, the potential retaliatory nature would make this unattractive for smaller users. In most cases, the retaliation would potentially be small (due to these users delegating everything to the bots).
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I'm aware of the retaliation issue, that's why I've been reluctant to suggest this.
The problem I was trying to solve relates to incentives and dynamic effects. When people permanently mute bad actors they put themselves into a position where they no longer see the problem and therefore have little incentive to fix it. I was trying to see if there was a way that people could get what they seem to want (no longer seeing an over-valued post) but with a good side-effect rather than a bad one.
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There are other potentially useful differences, too. It operates on a per-post basis, so could be used with more granularity, and it could potentially help to normalize the downvote in the ecosystem. Along with that, maybe "downvote" could be renamed to something like "deboost" or "downrank".
But, yeah, I don't know if the potential for retaliation is surmountable. It's an interesting idea, but hard to guess how it would play out in the real world.
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That's an interesting idea. I'm also hesitant, though, because of the retaliation factor. Small accounts should be able to downvote without fear of retaliation, but it hasn't worked out that way.
I think I remember reading in an early version of the whitepaper that the top-level author was intended to get a share of the rewards from replies below their posts. Not sure if that never got implemented, or if it was removed somewhere along the way.
This suggestion also aligns with something I had suggested to @the-gorilla for a condenser change. Let people set beneficiary in replies, and also let them set a default percentage for the author that they are replying to.
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