Yeah I don't really care about that in this particular context.   I am talking about how people decide upon producers/consumers.    This negative vote in any market and the effect it has in steemit.com right now really boils down to the analog of theft and or government intervention and deciding some product should not exist even if some people actually are interested in the products.

I did not use the comparison to illicit discussions about communism, socialism, monopolies, etc.   I would be willing to have a discussion on another blog post if you want to make one, let me know about it, and I will reply to you there.  :)

I do think there will be a lot of alternate ways to interact with the blockchain.   As to reddit...   I've been using it for about 5 years.   I've seen things shift and change there quite a bit.   I have 170 Post Karma, and 6199 Comment Karma.   So I am familiar with it.   

I am unfamiliar with @dots and what is occurring with them.   You may want to link me to some post that explains that situation or I may just need to check out the #dots tag.

I tended (prior to steem) to hang our in r/libertarian, r/anarcho_capitalism, r/conspiracy, r/gaming, r/pcmasterrace, r/linuxmasterrace, r/gamedev, r/unity3d, r/energy,  and miscellaneous others... also have r/news and r/worldnews in my feed but didn't tend to post much in them.    r/technology I would post and comment in occasionally.

I view our posts as filing bug reports while this platform is in beta.   I also view them as constructive criticism.   I believe this platform is absolutely amazing and has a strong possibility of altering the global paradigm as we know it.   Yet that doesn't mean I don't think it could be better.   Eliminating as much hostility as possible I believe is a very desirable goal.

Why?

Did you read my example.   Do you feel the need to walk into a super market and tell them about all the goods you do not plan to buy?

I suspect your answer is no.

So why do you feel the need to down vote posts you don't like that other people do?

It is very similar to consuming anything.   Vote on the things you are interested in.   A down vote is really just you shoving your opinion on what someone else should not like in their face.    Not voting on it at all will result in the number liking it not raising.

And really it is just a scale... take a ruler... put it in your hand... I'm going to use inches.    Let's say it is 12 inches long.

Positive votes are essentially like taking that ruler and positioning it at ZERO and each vote is an inch along that ruler.

Adding negative votes is more like zero being at the 6 inch mark on the ruler.    Yet the ruler is still 12 inches long, so it can be graphed, used to determine popularity, and used to calculate a trending the same whether you have down votes or don't have down votes.

The difference is the down votes promote hostility.   So if you can accomplish the same things without the downvote and not add hostility why would you not want to do that?

If you truly need to express your discontent and you believe that every negative vote should have a comment then why not simply NOT VOTE on the item and post a comment explaining why you didn't like it, and didn't vote on it?

Same thing, yet the down vote on steemit is harsh.  It reduces the monetary amount someone else accumulated the steem power to be able to award.   It also can significantly ding reputation if your reputation was higher than the person you down voted.

It basically can be used to enable censorship on a platform that is promoting being anti-censorship.

I guarantee there are things you like, and that you want to consume that are things I do not like.    HOW MANY PEOPLE like it is truly the only thing that matters.   How many people dislike it is irrelevant and other than an ego thing of trying to rub someones nose into the fact you don't like it I truly can see no point to it.

NOTE: This is if I approach it as a market for ideas and content.

IF: I were to view it as making decisions in a boardroom then a downvote makes sense.   Yet steemit does not resemble a boardroom, it does resemble a market.

I can try for "world peace"... though it is a hard problem. :)   Like I said I view my Devil's Advocate stuff with you as trying to make the system better.   I know you cannot do everything and some problems are pretty "hard".    Yet I also know you likely prefer people to be honest with you and not just agree. :)   All of the articles you have written have been well thought out.   You gave me a lot to think about.   Thinking about is not the same as coding it though, so I realize you have a very hard task.

<blockquote>austrian economist and anarcho capitalist</blockquote>
Thanks for saying that.   I'd only heard it from other people so my "hearsay" reference was because I had only heard it from others and could not confirm it.  It was not meant to imply that you were not.  (don't know if you saw it that way or not but I realized after the fact it might come off that way).

***What kind of abuses do you view as possible that couldn't be solved by a flag with spam, plagiarism, or abusive as options?***

Truly would like to know as I haven't seen those.   Feel free to use that maybe as a topic for another one of your blog posts. :)

I agree, people should have to have the option to reward and punish, but without using force. The steemit system utilizes this concept perfectly, in the voluntarist way.

It's their opinion, if they like something, they promote it, if they don't then they downvote it. It's the only way to keep steemit full of high quality content and remove spam.

Good point - beyond the actual impact of the downvote there is the impact on people's pride which can elicit a rather irrational response. One could ignore that - but hostile reactions do set and poison the tone on a platform.

So, yes, you might be right that downvotes are a bad idea even when their monetary impact is small.

Sure there is.  It's called the flag.  Use it to report abusive, spam, and plagiarism.    Even reddit if you go look at it has a REPORT mechanism.   It is the words REPORT POST right below any comment/post.

I do know we need that.  I have not advocated not having that.   I do not see us needing a down vote due to someone disliking something, or thinking someone should not be able to pay another person X amount.

People already get pretty upset with down votes on places like reddit.   I believe adding in the visible drop in financial earnings is likely to turn into a force multiplier for that anger.

Yes I understand how the market/process works.   Yet shelf position can also be determined without a negative vote.   In fact I don't know of a negative vote in the market.    Those shelf positions are more determined by supply and demand, which is that there is a demand that requires such quantities, and visibility is often tied to how often that product moves.    You can accomplish all of this with not voting, or positive votes.   Not voting is equivalent to the person that has no interest in the product.     It is just a numerical scale, which means you can determine prioritization, popularity, etc.   You do not require a negative vote for that.   All the negative vote does is alter the nature of the scale.   It is basically taking the concept of whole numbers which can be graphed and presented as a scale and instead switching them to integers which have a negative component.    Yet I can take integers and whole numbers and with some simple math represent the same image with either of them.

<blockquote>I think Steemit is a boardroom based on the code. </blockquote> - yes due to VESTS it indeed is this.   Yet does it need to function the same way as a boardroom?   We are afterall treading some new ground here and I do indeed think they have created a new paradigm.    That also means we do not necessarily have to do things the same way as things are done in the past.

This could be applied to the market analogy as well.    Yet my purpose is NOT to bash steem/steemit, I very much doubt I'll ever do that.   I do see it is in beta and I view this as submitting bug reports and trying to find solutions.   I know you've seen it's vast potential and so have I.   We are at the proverbial tip of the iceberg.   One of the things that has amazed me has also been the civility of this place.      I never saw anything I viewed as hostility on steemit until I saw the impact that a negative vote can have on people.    I view this as a continual perception issue that is only going to get more and more vocal as more people join us and down vote wars break out and unlike reddit where people often get really upset about down votes, here it will also visibly impact financial earning potential (as it currently stands) and I think that is going to be a force multiplier on how angry people are due to the down votes.

I took you up on your offer.