The recent whales war on Steemit, a public conflict in which high profile stakeholders are downvoting each other, is hard to avoid these days. It's also toxic, business averse and hilarious, if it wouldn't be sad.
There are issues at the platform level, which can be upgraded to streamline the experience here, and there are issue at the basic human nature, which cannot be modified so easily. For instance, greed.
Content Roles and Ethics
If somebody posts consistently to generate revenue by providing low quality content or misleading information, by using abusive or violent language, this can be considered unethical. In plain ol' traditional internet language, this is spam.
My first proposal is to outsource spam detection to external services, like Akismet, which proved their ability to do so for a long time now. Trying to build an internal anti-spam filter is a daunting task and it may take years.
So that's what flagging should be on Steemit: reporting something that is abusive and letting other services take care of it. In other words, not solving the problem from the same mental level which generated it. This is something that can be done at the platform level and it has been proven to work even before Steemit existed.
Everything which is not spam can receive rewards, based on votes. How votes are spread is subject to personal preferences, guilds, strategies and so on. This is part of the game and in sync with the PoS principle. You generate more rewards if you have a bigger stake. It encourages people to participate in the community in order to increase their influence.
The focus, though, should be on generating revenue, not on taking it out from somebody and making it available for somebody else.
My second proposal is that the stake weight of a downvote should be relative to the rewards a post already received, not to the platform.
The voting power drained by a downvote should also be relative to the stake the member has in the platform, not a fixed number, as it is right now.
Example:
A post receives an upvote from the whale A, which can move 10% from the reward pool. For the sake of simplicity, that would be $100.
Whale B comes and disagrees with the post (remember, this is a post that was past the spam filter, so it's just personal opinion).
Whale B can also move 10% from the reward pool, if he upvotes something. But when he downvotes, he takes out only $10 from the $100 which were already there. A downvote could take out only the amount equal with the stake of the voter, relative to the amount already there, at the moment of downvoting.
Whale B also sees its voting power decreased with the same percentage, 10%, not 1 (or whatever number is right now).
That will encourage the delay of voting, if a whale wants to generate the biggest amount of "damage". In turn, that will increase the visibility of the post, both for users and for search engines.
That will also make downvoting prohibitive, because it will drain the voting power quicker than upvoting. A 10% whale could upvote 100 times consecutively a day, but downvote consecutively only 10 times.
Abusive Guilds And Draining The Reward Pool
In this model, if all the whales are fighting on a post and they have equal stakes and equal opposite opinions (50% pro / 50%cons) the post will still make 50% of the potential reward. So even in this model, abusive guilds can be formed and, in an extreme scenario, drive out 50% of the reward pool every day.
The main consequence of such an extreme scenario is the devaluation of Steem. If these guilds are consistently performing these wars, nobody will be interested in buying more Steem, because content will become scarcer and scarcer. Eventually, there will be only a handful of people around and nobody will read anything. The 50% of Steem they can draw tomorrow will be less and less. Eventually, it will hit a threshold under which is not profitable anymore. Steem can go well under $.0.001 as it is the case with many altcoins now. So even a million Steem will worth just $1000.
I think such bottoms may be hit in this model a few times, until the model corrects itself. I also think this is a risk worth taking.
But putting more weight on the upvotes will eventually drive people to create supportive, spiraling out strategies. The remaining 50% of the reward pool that is still liquid can give rise to other trends which can oppose the abusive guilds by finding a more profitable way to split profits among writers.
If there is equal weight between downvoting and upvoting, the game will eventually stale.
And that's the direction in which we are heading, it seems.
Later edit: let's pretend that I upvote for a post to which I am allocating 100$. This is my right, as a user of the platform and it is in direct relation to that post. It's like an investment I made in that content, using my stake in the company.
If another users comes and downvote the post with the same amount, it's like an investor comes and take my initial investment in that post. It's negating my decision towards a specific post and invalidates my position in the community (the incentive for accumulating SP lowers if it can be nullified by an equal holder over the same post).
If the second investor would just say: "I don't believe in this business and I'm going to give you a warning", which translates in downvoting according to the model above, it will not invalidate the first investment, and it will also make a point.
It's more important to encourage investment than to reallocate money according to personal taste.
Of course, the model can be further improved and I'm curious about your opinions.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses