haha I don't think you need to be brilliant to see that rewarding content indifferent voting behavior (vote selling/farming) 4x more than good curation is a recipe for disaster. It's a surprise we adopted this economic model, and a bigger surprise to be stuck here for over a year.

You're right to be concerned about downvotes. Every one of these measures I've pushed for have trade offs. Ideally we don't want to take more rewards from content creators, we don't want the inequality of any suplinearity, and we don't want the drama, grief and toxicity of downvotes. The idea is to have a minimum combination of these measures that together, is sufficient to close the 4x gap in returns between vote farming and curation.

I'll focus on downvotes. I have a lot of concerns with additional downvote incentives, some of which overlap with yours.

The point you raised about directly using downvotes to benefit oneself is less of a concern if free downvotes are relatively limited. This is because unlike upvotes which can be directed to reward a specific account, downvotes can only be used to deprive an account of potential rewards. So if I have $100 of free daily downvotes, I can't really use them to direct rewards towards me very easily. The most I can do is throw them out indiscriminately on posts I have not voted and thereby indirectly have the posts I have voted to rise ever so slightly in value because I've taken the potential payout of someone else and throw it back into the rewards pool.

Now this doesn't entirely apply if free downvotes have a very high limit. If everyone is given as much free downvotes daily as their daily upvotes (which btw is what most witnesses support but I'm pushing against), then there may be sufficient incentive for larger stakeholders to collude and strategically place their downvotes in a way that significantly pulls rewards platform wide from other posts and pushes them towards posts from which they benefit. Overall this is not an issue with lower limits of free downvotes which I'm espousing.

There are further problems with downvotes. First and foremost, they just suck. Having even minor downvotes thrown at you feels terrible. Not only are they saying they think your content is shit (however right they may be here), they get to remove money that otherwise was directed towards you, making you feel worthless. Of course it gets a lot worse than that, imagine being a relatively small account and having some whale you've randomly ticked off decide to put you in a choke hold for a month. However bad that is, it'll get a lot worse with even with a moderate amount of free downvotes. They greatly contribute to toxicity and escalate negative emotions. I don't think the higher ups really appreciate this as they don't quite use the platform in a way that many of us do, as a social platform.

Compounding this is the fact that unlike upvotes, there are no real checks and balances against free downvotes. Higher curation rewards in upvotes should hopefully become the dominant form of income generation for stakeholders, and thus there's an economic incentive for them to be cast carefully with precision, as your returns are determined by them. There's no similar incentive to keep downvotes precise, proportionate and reasonable. I'm not rewarded more for casting the fairest downvotes on the entire platform. And given the emotional nature of them, they'll be anything but precise, proportionate and reasonable.

For a stakeholder that's using a curation bot or service and making their returns that way, there's little recourse against them if they choose to use downvotes irresponsibly. As they don't post themselves, they're impervious to retaliation and cannot be deterred that way. Remedying an abusive free downvote requires an upvote, which are costly. Free downvotes may serve to keep upvotes in check but the reverse isn't true as there's no such thing as a free upvote.

I honestly have a lot of problems with introducing this change. Nevertheless if it's a moderate amount, I don't see too much direct incentive to use them abusively. There's little to gain directly from abusing them other than if you're a sadist, and I do imagine most of it will be directed with good intentions.

The simple truth is 50% curation just isn't enough to make curation competitive with vote farming so we need downvotes to help, despite all its considerable flaws. Because I strongly believe that however bad they are, the utter failure of a content discovery and rewards platform in which we find ourselves right now is worse. If you have any other ideas with fewer detriments, I'm definitely all ears.

Good to hear from you again my friend