Proposal: Change Up and Downvotes to bids

2019-11-12T10:57:09
Hi everyone,

The Problem:

People don't seem to get how downvotes work and see them as personal attacks against them or their content or even worse as an attempt of silencing or censoring them.
The problem I see here is that up and downvotes are not very flexible.
Short example:
Post A has a value of 20$,
In my subjective opinion I believe this post should not be worth more than 10$
I downvote it to 19$
A whale comes along and downvotes it to 0$
Now I have to go back to the post and remove my downvote since I don't agree that it should be worth 0$
How likely is it that I will come back to a post I downvoted later to check if it turned out a reasonable price?
  • Highly unlikely

My Solution:

Thus, I believe that the way Steem should work should not be by up- and downvoting but by bidding on content.
And the weight of the bid depends on the quantity of SP the user holds.
Short example:
Post A is valued 20$ (Let's assume all voters up to now bid the post to 20$)
I bid that the post should be worth 10$
Post goes down to 19$
A whale comes along who wants to bid the post to 0$, he not only has to counter all the 20$ bids now, but also my 10$ bid since the value he considers is below the one I bid for the post.

Why would this help?

You might ask now, why this would make any difference, if the whale wants he can still downvote the post to 0$.
And I say yes, he can, and that's his right, he purchased a ton of Steem and if he believes a post should be worth nothing he can try to use his power to do so.
The difference of this system is two fold:
  1. It will be more difficult to completely zero posts since some people might agree that rewards are too high, but most people don't believe the person shouldn't get any rewards at all.
  2. Most importantly, this will change the culture of Steem, people will see that it is an actual bidding process on each of the posts. Thus, people won't be mad if someone places a lower bid than what their post is currently paying out.
    Since these people are just evaluating how much they think the content is worth.
At the moment we also have this bidding process, but, the problem is that
a) This doesn't appear as clearly to the user
b) It is not very flexible as I showed in an above example
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