RE: Retaliatory Flagging, Apathy, Fear, and Determining Community Trust
In the original design the vesting schedule was 2 years and the rewards were nonlinear, so there was more incentive for consensus. I also think downvotes should be included in curation rewards.
The whole system depends on getting SP into the hands of people who vote with long term vision rather than for short term payouts. It's like a corporation with perpetual shareholder votes on whether to liquidate to pay dividends, or reinvest in the business. Control by those who just want the money now means death for the community.
The key point of your proposal seems to be giving people something to lose, but I'm not sure adding additional values to every account is necessary for that. What do you think of having SP permanently at risk with every vote, so some of your SP can be burned if the final consensus is strongly counter to your position?
People would be fearful when voting but that may be a good thing. They would be careful on what they voted on. The big question is how do we implement such a system and how do we determine consensus? I do like the burning aspect of the idea, however.
Hell, what the consensus even really mean on Steemit? The current system lacks any consensus. The current flag wars and voting abuse issues are indicative of that.
The more and more I think about it, the more and more I start to agree with those that argue for returning to r^2 rewards. They encourage users to put their money into a single account and hold it there. There are probably better solutions to dealing with the inequitable distribution but linear rewards have shown that they are a poor solution and cause a whole new set of problems with being able to subvert consensus by spreading votes out through lots of phony accounts.
A bit of caution and awareness would certainly be healthy, if not outright fear. Consensus is established through the voting process, but with linear rewards it's pretty meaningless. The change to linear rewards was implemented to satisfy populist demand, but I think it was misguided. R^2 may be beyond what's necessary, but to reward consensus R^1 is unhelpful.
I'd like to see a return to R^2 (or maybe R^1.5?), symmetrical rewards for downvotes as for upvotes on the same curve, and negative SP curation penalties for voting in opposition to the final consensus. Since it would all be on the same curve, the penalties would scale with the amount of voting power used and the strength/weight of the consensus opposed.
This conversation chain contained some good comments, so you win some SBD.
Thanks!