RE: 10 Simple rules for Steemizenship - for discussion
I've said before that I'm not a fan of downvotes, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has shown that their benefits outweigh their harm.
The initial price rally from the slump of 6 cent Winter in '17 was correlated very nicely with the Whale Experiment (where a majority of whales agreed to not vote and others agreed to downvote any votes that were deemed to big). In my opinion the Whale Experiment was an Unequivocal success in demonstrating that downvotes are Essential to the platform and their power, views that I am sure many people hold as well because they too saw that a few whales and some downvotes could create a meaningful impact and effectively increase the average vote by 10x, giving value to Powering Up, as was first hypothesized, and the community was declaring this success long before the price did finally rally, but you don't have to take my word for it, it's all there in the chain. Seek and Ye sHaLl FiNd
If I were a whale with a lack of ethical inhibitions, I might use downvotes in a cycle where phase I would be to aggressively and visibly - with great fanfare - downvote people and chase them away in order to drive down the price of steem so I could buy low, then phase II would be to let the price drift back up in the absence of flag-wars, at which point I could sell high and repeat the process.
Because Flags are a net negative. Every flag that drives people away redistributes the rewards to others who would likely blow up in the vacuum you created. Steem Power prevails.
I was there for the whale experiment. It ran from March 2017 to HF19, which was in June/2017. Well before most of the price run-up. Also, as I recall, the whole point of that experiment was to simulate the linear reward curve, which HF21/22 just removed because of community dissatisfaction, so it's not clear how informative that experiment really was. The price rally in winter '17 was also correlated with BTC at 20K, which I think was far more relevant. As this chart from Yahoo finance shows, the price rise seemed to have little to do with the whale experiment. The whole crypto market was up.
You're right about flags redistributing rewards, but that doesn't necessarily make up for the psychological effect that flags have on people. It's pure speculation to suggest that the positive and negative emotions are in balance. In general, people prioritize loss avoidance over pursuing benefits (coincidentally, I just read an article on this. See link #2 here ).
Anyway, that wasn't the point of that item. I agree that we can't eliminate downvotes without implementing a different reward mechanism to incentivize self-regulation of voting strength, and it certainly wouldn't be a good idea to experiment with that on the main Steem blockchain now. It'll have to wait 'til SMTs or steem-engine tokens (or some other chain) can experiment with other reward algorithms. I specifically acknowledged that I'm in the minority and downvotes are here to stay. The point of that item was to merely to suggest moderation as a norm when downvoting over reward disagreement.
The price run from spring/summer '17 is what I was referring to and the point of the experiment was to simulate a linear reward curve in order to entice people to vest/power up, which is why it was a success and what makes me think that steem blowing up from 6 cents was due to that simulation.
Thanks for the reply! There was definitely a positive mood about the linear curve around the time of HF19, so you might be right that it encouraged people to power up in the early-middle part of 2017. Philosophically, I still like the idea that voting strength was exactly proportionate to stake, so it's a shame that people eventually found so many ways to game it.
People wanted linear in HF 17 and Ned didn't deliver, which is why the Experiment happened. One of the first posts about the experiment was from that one witness I cannot remember the name of right now, Tim something, anyway, in it he said that the goal/hypothesis was to help the price, and even though without any proper community heads up on the experiment it succeeded as you probably remember, with many people who were initially against it singing it's praises not long after, and many declaring it a Success. I was from the start all for the experiment because I recognized that it was trying to free up the damn crowded pool and even though many people were saying success simply because they witnessed their vote go from mere fractions of a cent to 5-10 cents and others seeing their cents go to dollars, its clear to me that the better distribution of rewards made it more enticing to power up as was hypothesized. I think it gave us a good look at just how powerful and robust this system is since A: Ned Failed at Appeasing the Community B: Individual Actors Combined their stake and coordinated to implement something they thought would Appease the Community C: The Comie nitie Saw that it was Gud.