Let me start off by saying that I am decidedly not a fan of down-votes. I think that they are anti-social, and with extremely rare exceptions, I don't use them - on Steem or any other social media platform. I also don't believe that the benefits of down-votes on the Steem platform have ever been demonstrated to outweigh the harms. My personal guess continues to be that something patterned after a second price auction, with positive-only voting, plus a rewards curve with penalties for stake-splitting, would be a superior strategy for appraising the value of posts and comments.
But... I recognize that I'm in the minority on that opinion, and that many folks think that downvotes are vital to the platform. I also recognize that I might be wrong. So in the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, I lay my own aversion to down-votes aside, and offer this suggestion for discussion.
Besides the distaste that many users feel for downvotes, and the opportunity cost of spending a downvote when you could otherwise be pursuing curation rewards, I suspect that a third reason for many people to forego downvotes is out of fear of retaliation.
So, for this discussion, we're ignoring the philosophical objections to downvotes, and we're hoping that HF21 will fix the problem with the opportunity cost, but to the best of my knowledge, nothing is being done to address the fear of retaliation. That's where this post comes in.
In the original Steem whitepaper, it was envisioned that large groups of minnows and dolphins would be able to control whale abuse by down-voting in crowds. In practice, that hasn't happened - perhaps, because whales are able to single out the early downvoters for severe retaliation, and the rest of the crowd is paralyzed by fear.
With that background in mind, and before I get to my point, I invite you to watch this 2013 TED talk, where Bonnie Bassler discusses the concept of quorum sensing:
Consider - What if the potential minnow and dolphin down-voters pattern their behavior after bacterial quorum sensing? Step 1, they signal their intent to down-vote a post with a certain strength, step 2 - they wait for allies; and step 3 - if enough minnows and dolphins signal their intent, they all down-vote at the same time, in a single wave; or also step 3 - if a small number of minnows and dolphins signal their intent, nothing happens and no one else ever knows about it. Either an overwhelming flood of minnows and dolphins down-votes the post, or none do.
A whale can retaliate against a small number of minnows or dolphins, but not against an overwhelming ensemble of them, so the down-voters are potentially still vulnerable during the signaling phase. To prevent retaliation during the signaling phase, step 1 would either have to be encrypted and stored in some undecipherable fashion on the blockchain, or else performed off-chain through a dapp and/or browser extension. For the sake of discussion, I'll imagine that it's built into a front-end like steemit, steempeak, eSteem, Partiko, busy, or even a stand-alone web site that's dedicated to abuse prevention.
Now, imagine that you're reading through posts, and you come across a post that seems highly overvalued. You want to down-vote it, but you look at the author's wallet, and you see that they could down-vote you to oblivion without breaking a sweat. Instead of downvoting immediately, however, the web site offers you a check box to pre-register your downvote. Then, if enough other minnows and dolphins eventually agree with you, the web site will trigger a flood of downvotes all at once. If not, then your vote never gets executed, and you're safe from retaliation.
For bonus points, it's a topic for a different day, but maybe someone could even set up a layer 2 token with a smart contract that pays out "reverse curation rewards" for people who pre-register to downvote on Steem posts where the down-vote eventually gets triggered. Thus, people would be able to earn rewards for picking "the right" posts to down-vote.
Thoughts?
Steve is also a co-founder of the Steem's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.
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