On Downvotes, Stake and Power
Downvotes
That image of a thumbs down next to Hive logo is quite simple but reflects a very negative image doesn't it? A visceral feeling of revulsion perhaps. However, this post is not about how downvotes are bad, whales are ruining the Hive or many other bla blas. Downvotes are a useful tool, and it should be the right of any stake holder to downvote any post they want to their heart's content if their voting power allowed them.
That last part is what this is about, the downvote voting pool and why it shouldn't exist and all voting should be tied to one pool.
Stake
We are all told that Hive Power is our stake on the chain. It let's us vote and participate in governance. But is it true? In my opinion, the free downvote pool invalidates other's stake on the chain. If someone can freely invalidate someone's vote without a cost to them, this is certainly an attack on expression of their stake. However small or however big.
If you can adjust a post's rewards freely because you did not agree with how much that post earned, that is an attack on stake of all the people that voted on that post.
But people auto-vote and it is garbage content, it is stolen content yadda yadda. Doesn't matter, those votes came from their stake. If they are not prudent with their votes, it isn't your right to prevent their expression of stake without a cost to you. (Of course, at the moment it is due to how the blockchain works. This is a discourse on why it shouldn't be that way.)
Power
And all this comes to Power in the end. Free downvotes create an asymmetric stake power, a powerful Hive stakeholder can destroy the stake expression of others at no cost to themselves. If you don't see problem with this and how it undermines everything this chain stands for then there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. Powers that be probably would not give up this power. When the downvotes are free, it becomes easier to downvote for "reward amount disagreements" because it doesn't cost anything for the downvoting party, and that is asymmetrical nature of it, how stakes can easily be invalidated.
Thanks for reading. I hope that my view gives you different perspective on downvotes. Personally, I haven't seen anyone discuss this nature of the free downvote pool on chain. How it can become tool of oppression of stake expression in the hands of someone malicious. Basically an attack on stakeholders baked into the chain.
See you in a next post whenever™️
I don't disagree that the number 25% could be lowered since I think it was that high upon implementation facing the bid bot era it attempted to combat, but completely removing it would mean we'd see way more upvote abuse.
There are so many more blind/dumb/auto/malicious upvotes than there are bad downvotes.
PS. thanks for replying to people in the hive subreddit.
This is why we have a discourse and lowering it can be a way to see if we really need it in the first place. From what I see people that are downvoting don't run out of the downvoting mana at all.
As I said in the post, if people want to vote for dumb stuff that is their right as stakeholders isn't it? But if someone can come and change the reward freely at no cost to them, simply because they disagreed on how much reward it get. That action should cost the downvoter as well rather than getting a free pass. Because that is no longer combatting abuse in my opinion.
And you can correct me on this, but people who are combatting such abuse have voting power in spades that they can throw on the issue rather than needing free downvotes to protect their stake. At least nowadays.
Hell maybe the downvote pool rather being a change requiring HF, it can be a parameter that could adjusted by witnesses.
@foxon shared the link in discord and funny enough just that day we helped someone recover their account on Hive Discord. So, I thought I might as well reply.
You are ignoring the fact that this disincentivizes people from doing good downvotes, which already takes a lot of time to find, then may be a headache of many shitty repercussions just for protecting the reward pool. Thus almost no one does good downvoting to begin with let alone a lot of bad ones.
Protecting reward pool argument is no different then protecting the children argument. A good stakeholder/citizen would protect the reward pool/children regardless of incentivization. Because protecting those things is an incentive in on itself.
"I thought this post was overly rewarded, so I gave a downvote." You know this happens, and you know this happens more than the actual good downvotes. Someone should be able to do this, them not being able to this is not my argument. My argument is them being able to do so freely at no cost to them. Because doing so as you know hurts the stakeholders.
Let's imagine a scenario where I have 1M HP and start downvoting posts that have rewards at random. This is more damaging to the chain then any abuse of reward pool can do. It will cause creators to be pushed away, and actively damage the stakeholders. What can you guys do? Counter-upvote to negate the downvote, well it is terrible that it actually costs to do that.
And what if people disagreed with what you say that is abuse? Are they not allowed to disagree? With downvote pool it is evident that they are not allowed to disagree, because suppression of their stake comes at a no cost while if they try to disagree by upvoting you are just gonna remove those votes too for free also.
And what is the reward pool, what is its purpose and what point it becomes an abuse of it? (Ignoring the fact that, the most held HP by the collective deciding what is abuse.)
I can argue that for example, giving votes to buildawhale burn comments is an abuse of the reward pool. Because to my understanding the reward pool's function is to spread Hive stake to other people, not concentrate it. (But as the people that hold most HP in the collective is doing this it is not abuse yadda yadda.)
This is not an attack on anybody don't get me wrong. It is just an example to demonstrate how what is constituting abuse can change from a person to person and downvote pool does not allow people to disagree on what is abuse.
I hope you are getting what I am saying.
Adjusting rewards down on overrewarded posts are good downvotes however, I'm sure you're aware of many "blind stakeholders" who vote things up way too hard. For instance in ocd we have rules in many initiatives where we don't vote posts unless they're at least 12 hours long to prevent these "blind" upvotes to happen to see them in the hot/trending list and overreward them - but others don't place these rules because they wanna be overrewarded - while to some it happens so seldomly that we let it be (it's fine now and then). Good downvotes can also come from certain authors being overrewarded time after time without giving many a reason to justify the rewards, for instance someone who is only a content creator and barely plays the social game, we may not know why they're getting so much rewards, why they're getting upvoted late in some cases even at the cost of the curator, etc, but downvotes may help send some of those rewards back to everyone else so it is distributed more fairly.
In terms of burn comments or hbd.funder ones, one could argue the reward pool is set to always give out a certain amount of stake but since we're not really seeing a wave of new users coming in and in general posts are deemed "overrewarded" by many other stakeholders, it is acceptable to not distribute those author rewards at all and use them for something else that benefit all stakeholders.
For instance I'm spending most of my daily voting power rewarding reddit shares lately as I think bringing traffic to our front-ends is more valuable than just creating content that very few consume.
If/when the time comes that that changes I hope people would join in on curating users again to help distribute stake, but I don't really think it centralises stake, one could argue that a lot of stake is going to authors for barely any effort lately and that this activity itself hasn't really helped bring in new users, not to mention authors who don't even care if it does.
I disagree on this being a good downvote, it doesn't matter if the stakeholder is blind or voting automagically or many other things. You are removing their vote without an actual good reason. Being overrewarded is not an abuse of the reward pool, and not a good reason for someone's vote to be removed freely. If it cost them their own actual voting power to do this, I would have no problem. Since then it becomes an equivalent exchange of stake. (You don't get rewards and I give up rewards.)
And I also disagree with this again, why should it matter that they don't play the social game. That is once again in my opinion is not a good downvote. Not participating in the social game of Hive is not an abuse of the reward pool.
What I would consider a good downvote is, downvotes on illegal content. There is clear good reason for it.
I don't say I am against this, it is their stake they can do it. But there is also no reason for some other people to not consider it abuse as well, when they work on spreading stake to other people.
Yeah but in that instance rewards are still going to other people rather than going to null. You get your part of the curation reward, and the person that shared the reddit post gets their reward as well. That still spreads the stake around and is still more beneficial to the chain then rewards going to null.
Same for HBD.funder, it inadvertently funds the DHF and those funds in time gets released to other people and spreads the stake around.
But voting on burn comments, that sends the author rewards to null does not spread the stake around. It doesn't concentrate the stake per se, but what it does is to keep power.
Because let's face it if there were to curators with 10HP and once creator with 0 HP and one curator vote for that author and the other curator vote on a burn comment. The the distribution changes to 10.5 HP for curators and 0.5HP for the author when it could have been 1 HP for them. Giving them more voice and stake.
Yeah I'm not a fan of burning inflation either, at least not through curation, it'd be another thing if we could buy that hive up instead.
Yeah dunno i think rewarding users for effort and more than just posting content and somehow figuring out ways to get a lot of votes, some that may be backroom deals that may end up giving curators a higher return anyway, is better than just letting any overrewarding go wild. I've seen it get quite crazy and it'd be a disservice to others to not adjust the rewards there. Not to mention the entitlement and expectations it breeds where people start earning rewards for little to no effort and expect that to go on forever at the cost of all other stakeholders. I don't think you're considering all the options and occurrences of where overrewarding has become straight up abuse.
In my opinion overrewarding is a user problem.
Less users -> Less posts -> More overrewarded posts -> More reward adjustments.
You yourself said that most stakeholders think that all posts are overrewarded and that is plain simple reason why all posts are "overrewarded" nowadays. Too many curators, not enough posts. I am sure if we had 10x more posts, some of the overrewarding would alleviate by itself.
I disagree on this being a good downvote, it doesn't matter if the stakeholder is blind or voting automagically or many other things. You are removing their vote without an actual good reason.
-> The whole point is that you don't need a valid reason to up/down votes something the votes just represent how you think the post should be rewarded
You should read the discussion again, my whole point is that you can do the downvotes at no cost to downvoter. If it cost the downvoter their voting power then sure they shouldn't require a valid reason. Because that way it comes at a cost to them.
Yes, but upvoting come at a cost ?
In both case you loose voting or downvoting mana. So i don't really spot a difference between a up or down vote
Downvoting is a separate pool from your normal voting. It is precisely chain giving you free 25% of your upvote pool as downvote pool.
If you upvote a post, and I come and downvote it. You lose your upvote but I don't lose my upvote. I am free to go upvote a content. You lost the value you would get from your upvote, I did not lose the value I would get from any of my upvotes. That is the cost.
Or lets say there is a malicious downvoter, to undo the damage he has done you would need to spend your upvote which incurs an opportunity cost. Downvotes don't have these opportunity cost as long as you don't use more than your downvoting pool.
When i mean't a cost it was a "real cost" your not charged hive directly for any of those, if you off set one of my votes, then i can off set one of your votes and we end up both having lost our VP and DP.
That's why it auto regulate,
It would cost to undo damage, but you can still undo his votes too
Yes but if I don't post? What then?
You would have to target posts that I curate but those could be just random people. Now you are targetting random people to get at me. It comes with a real cost.
Also adding that you will never be able to counter me. Because for example my whole DP pool is equivalent to your whole VP pool. That is the asymmetrical power.
Well if i donwvote to counter your vote there a high chance it was on someone else post anyway, but since we both cancel each other vote in the end the people we curate dont lose / gain anything
No, people we curate lose because downvotes are not applied to one specific vote. It is spread to all curators that voted on that post. So you are once again attacking random people to get at me.
If I was malicious this just works directly in my favor.
But "malicious" don't mean anything, your free to vote/down vote anything so there are not really any "malicious" downvotes, i should be able to downvote content because i dont like it just like on reddit no ?
Problem is downvote pool is free, it doesn't incur an opportunity cost on the downvoter. Opportunity cost is bore by those who upvoted. Which invalidates their stake.
If it incurred an opportunity cost to you to downvote then sure you should be able to downvote to your heart's cost. Because you are the one paying its cost, not others.
If DV had a cost i would downvote and nor would anyone because you have more interest to not get a cost that to preserve the inflation
That is a you problem. If someone cared strongly about something like illegal content and abuse they can easily spare some of their voting power. If they cared strongly cared about overrewarded content they could spare their power. And whales that do use downvotes have spades of power to spare. Most of their downvoting activity would not cost them more than 2% of their voting power.
Mmmh, i dont really see how it would be positive though haha
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