I love the little walk down memory lane haha.  All the things we waged war against.  There's so much stigma to the flag now though that that doesn't happen much anymore.

> On steem, the voting is the basis for the rules.  Voting exists to determine the rules.  

I find this very compelling. On Steemit, the social rules are crowdsourced.

Resteemed and really looking forward to the potential solution. Especially one that would make posts like this one earn one hell of a lot more than a buck fifty. Nothing proves the point that adjustments need to be made better than this just did.  
Seeing a post saying nothing more than boobs would make me snicker. Seeing a picture of manboobs would make me LOL. I'm starting to realize I have the sense of humor of a twelve year old boy.

Hey, check that out, I resteem you and you shoot up to fourteen bucks (because of course I'm that influential LOL)

Just wanted to let you know that you are missed. I took your advice and hooked my wagon to anyx, though my vote is more of a 'like' at this point. However my husband is considering moving some bitcoin into steem, my steem, so my impact may rise considerably in the near-ish future, though unfortunately not nearly enough to go head to head with certain members of the community.  
But should  you start posting again, and especially once my voting power rises, I will give you any boost I can.

I will read this and respond in turn.   I will tell you that I cannot be COMPLETELY wrong.   Why?   Because, I am also describing the perceptions and what happens to some of these people.   I am also describing people that do not use steemit, or reddit because of these things.   Those are very REAL people and REAL events, therefore it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to be completely wrong.   I suspect you are one of those people that tends to exaggerate and use absolutes like never, always, completely, etc.    Yet it is likely you mean mostly, or almost.   You do qualify it as such in some places then in others you use the absolute.    This by the way is a logical fallacy on your part.    I am going to read and respond to the rest, but since you are pointing out fallacies, I thought it only reasonable that I point out your fallacy of absolutes.    All it takes for the word "completely" to be wrong is a single case where it is not true.    I spoke of many issues, and those things dealt in some cases with specific people, events, etc.    Thus, the use of "completely" is a fallacy in this case... I'm off to read it, digest it, and respond in context of the things not tied to you saying I am completely wrong.

>The false premise dwin and others who share his position on downvoting is believing that voting on Steemit is or ought to be like voting on twitter, facebook and reddit, except that our voters should follow the rules better.

Not even close.  I've said several times we should NOT be emulating those places.   We can do something new.   So that is not my premise.   In fact I spoke out against that several times.

You did not really define exactly what you believe my premise is.   You mention it several places and then go off on some tangent.   This was the only definitive place where you seemed to define my premise, and it actually was contrary to my statements.    If I missed where you defined it please let me know.

As to concern with X person getting all the reward pool for Steem Sports, Travel, etc, I have not been one to bash such things.    So that concept you did not say specifically came from me.   Thank you for that, as I've never been one to advocate what people CAN post about, and be REWARDED for.

In fact, I've advocated for the opposite.   I don't believe my dislike of sports as a topic is relevant to the situation.   Other people like that topic.   So I simply don't vote on it, and don't tend to read those posts.    I never would down vote them simply because it is a topic I dislike.   This would also be true if we had a guy who liked talking about "clam identification" and wrote post after post about such a topic.   I would not down vote that either.   It is his interest, and perhaps a small niche of other people.    I up vote the things I am interested in, and I leave other things alone.   This goes for Steem Sports, Travel, Food, etc.

As to the "sock puppet" accounts.  (you did not describe them as such) that @klye, @bacchist, and @ats-david found examples of and wrote about them.   In those cases a person appeared, their first post was $1000+ for the first post, and every post after that.   It was consistently the same group of people up voting every thing.    Some cases like that of @msgiving it was determined they were plagiarizing the material they were getting thousands of dollars every day for.

That is an example of gaming the system.    The system is not designed to PERMIT that because it is deemed acceptable.   The system allows it because, @dantheman and crew haven't determined a way that they could address it.


Now let me define my premise for you.   I'll try to keep it short.

<ul>
<li>We want to grow, and hopefully attract a lot of people</li>
<li>Subjective down vote by powerful people has FAR more impact here than it does on reddit, or any other place as it DOES take away from the potential earnings, and it is VISIBLE when it does it</li>
<li>This can be viewed as very aggressive.    It has not happened to me, but my posts are typically inspired by watching numerous people talk of leaving, stop posting, or mention someone they tried to join saw things like that and said "no thanks".</li>
<li>And the main crux - Whether I like Sea Cucumbers and like to write articles about them it is actually IRRELEVANT if you don't like the topic.   You can ignore it and focus on things you do like.   Yet some people would down vote and dictate what is right for people to be interested in.   Back this with enough steem power and you can make it so posts of that type are consistently worth $0 even if there are other people interested.</li>
</ul>

You have rightfully described HOW the system works.   Yet, I don't know if you fail to realize it ONLY works that way NOW as no alternative has been found.   It is in beta, so discussing this now becomes important.

As to my reaction to @bitcoindoom's post.   Yes, I said I could see why an opposing action is required by game theory to prevent out of hand gaming of a system.    Yet, at the end I also said it is possible the opposite force could come in the form of something other than a down vote.

UP VOTE:
<ul>
<li>Increases vote counter by 1</li>
<li>Allocates your Steem Power committed to be taken from the pool at payout</li>
<li>The impact of this is not readily apparent to ANYONE other than the post itself on the platform, as the potential payout fluctuates for other reasons besides just up votes</li>
<li>Potential payout reflects the new potential payout based upon percentage of the steem pool, and the current market value of steem</li>
</ul>

DOWN VOTE (or properly the FLAG since it is not in the voting area, but is considered a DOWNVOTE at the CLI level):
<ul>
<li>Reduces the vote total by 1.</li>
<li>Applies the down vote persons STEEM POWER in a negative fashion to the overall pool for this vote. </li>
<li>Potential payouts increase across the platform due to pool change, but as with the up vote this is largely unnoticed.</li>
<li>The person sees their post drop in potential earnings</li>
</ul>

It seems true that a person getting a vote and their post increasing by $0.01 (though often it is $0.00) is acceptable.   When it makes a big jump due to a whale they are ecstatic and it can be very motivational.

They do not seem to have an opposite reaction when the reverse is said.   A down vote and a loss of $0.00 or $0.01 they seem to mostly shrug off.   You'll get the same "*Why did you down vote my post?*" stuff that happens on reddit.

However, if their potential earnings drop from $50 to $5 that is very noticeable, and the reaction seems quite a different level.

In reality... the same thing happened in both directions.

Yet, our goal is to attract people here and make them want to stay.   In this case the simple +/- seems to have a noticeable psychological impact.   This is also with predominantly reasonable community members.

I believe it is reasonable to believe this will increase and be worse if we achieve our goals and do attract a lot of people.

I DO get your point from a purely logical, reason based perspective.

I have NOT experienced this problem myself.    I've witnessed it done to others.    Several times with very powerful results for totally subjective reasons.

At the moment their seem to be whales that will try to counter the actions of such other whales.    The balance does seem to happen.   Not always, as they may not always see it.

Will it remain this way as more people join?

I believe most of us think the system will improve over time as power spreads out a bit.   Yet, we are speculating, and that is all we can do as we are journeying into unknown territory without precedence.

>Thats the great thing about voting.  You can vote your beliefs, I can vote my beliefs, the other guy can vote his beliefs, and at the end of the day, things will shake out how they shake out, but we can all be be OK with the final outcome because we all had a chance to participate  in the final outcome. 

This might be true in an equal world where your vote has the same power as mine.    However, that is not what we have here.    Several hundred people can up vote a topic here and get it up to $20.00 or so only to have a single person reverse the results of those hundred people.    This actually has happened.

So yes, your statement is true on a 1:1 basis.    That is NOT our environment, so assumption it will work that way when not all votes are created equal is a pretty big assumption.

Hey, I forgot to resteem this yesterday.   I was kind of wrapped up in post holiday stuff.    I have resteemed it now.   Too late for 24 hour reward, but it does at least keep your response to my stuff on my profile as well.  ;)

Again... sorry.   I should have resteemed it yesterday.

I never down vote, I just ignore something I don't like, probably there will be somebody else who likes it and I'll just be hurting someone I don't even know.

I found your post very informative, Sigmajin!
Upvoted & Followed.

### Dogs are not cooler than cats!!! ;0)

This is a truly excellent piece and your clarity on the subject is so refreshing. Thank you! 😎

Your point on the reversal of rule enforcement is extremely important and should be in the Wiki. Norms emerge from voting, end of. By any means you can, try to convince people to vote your way, but I think the system should not be altered to bake in any of those rules.

One point though. The voting rules can be altered by a fork, so while what you describe is certainly the most accurate description of the current situation, it could be altered. This is good to bear in mind as time goes on and we see more controversies.

---

_Edit:_ I had intended to comment on your point about kyle
> I don't think klye really gives a shit, in his heart of hearts, about whether SS has the right to distribute these photos.  I think klye saw was ss taking up a huge portion of the reward pool with multiple posts every day, saw the new "steemy" posts as potentially more money to this enterprise, and he decided "well, theres got to be something wrong".

I think you're probably right. The thing is that it doesn't matter in a way, because he's free to act as he acts, and we listen to him or not, etc. etc. without needing to know that information. But there's wisdom in understanding the actions of ourselves and others in a deeper way, and trying to see how this Steemit society work, wisdom that can help us. The way you've approached this is like an anthropological ethnography, it's like the "Thick Description" Clifford Geertz talks about. Great work, it's like you're thinking as an outsider while an insider.

<p>This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Jan 01. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $8.91 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.</p> 
<p>See the full rankings and details in <a href="https://steemit.com/curation/@screenname/the-daily-tribune-most-undervalued-posts-of-jan-01---part-ii">The Daily Tribune: Jan 01 - Part II</a>. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in <a href="https://steemit.com/curation/@screenname/introducing-the-daily-tribune-most-undervalued-posts-of-nov-04---part-i">our initial post</a>.</p>
<p>If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.</p>

Great post.  A couple thoughts:

My biggest issue with downvoting posts just because you subjectively think they are overvalued is that it lessens the "lottery" effect of the steem platform, and it's the lottery effect that actually encourages people to invest in building the steem platform.  Here's what I mean:

Imagine a world where the author rewards were simply evenly distributed among all authors posting over a given period.  Being divided among so many people, they wouldn't amount to much for any one author.  And, authors wouldn't therefore be incentivized to invest in creating great content because they know it would never pay off.  

By contrast, when aspiring authors see other authors occasionally earn "outsized rewards"--that is, an award that is hugely profitable to the author, meaning that the author earned far more than is "reasonable" given the amount of effort put into the post--aspiring authors are encouraged (1) to post reasonably often (essentially buying more lottery tickets), thereby adding value to the system, and (2) to post stuff of reasonable or excellent quality (since crap post's like just posting "boobs" will never win outsized rewards), thereby adding value to the system.

Now, suppose that someone makes a makeup tutorial of excellent quality and it earns $25k worth of steem.  Despite it being of good quality, few people in their right mind think such a post is objectively worth $25k.  So, many of them  start downvoting it until its worth only, say, $250.  Because the downvoters don't get to decide who gets the steem that is reallocated by virtue of the downvote, downvoters are essentially then always just downvoting to more evenly distribute the coins.  That is, they are downvoting simply prevent the bunching of reewards among only a few posts.  

But again, it's exactly this bunching that creates the lottery effect that incentivizes the desired behavior from other aspiring authors.  Undermining this lottery effect lessons the incentive and, taken to an extreme, could kill it altogether.  

So, I like the downvote, but I'm currently among those who think it should only be used very selectively and judiciously and not just becasue one believes that a given post is "overvalued."

Just my two cents.  Again, great post.

It's hard to adapt yet.
But it's innovative and very interesting.

According to Steemit.com:

"The flag should be used for the following:

Fraud or Plagiarism
Hate Speech or Internet Trolling
Intentional miscategorized content or Spam"

The way I see it we should either simply remove this instruction for flagging or add a downvote button, because right now that's seemingly not even how the founders use the flag and that frankly makes it look kind of silly....

Edit: The instructions for flagging were since changed and as of right now (1/19/2017) all that remains is to replace the flag icon and adjust the powers weilded by a low number of whale votes. 

The team at @busy.org have expressed similar ideas as I've expressed before, about separatin the powers of the flag and the downvote.

This is a fantastic post.  

I disagree with your stance for similar reasons which I think harks back to your point of the extreme subjectivity that goes into these decisions.  

I heard an interview with Scott Adams recently where one of the points he made was that life becomes a lot easier if we realise that most of us act irrationally most of the time but come up with rational excuses to justify it after the fact.

@sigmajin - great post! As someone who personally subscribes to the "only downvote for abuse" policy, I found that you made a very compelling argument. 

One question that I have (and maybe you will address this in your next post) is how do you address the fact that being downvoted harms the user experience? I don't think that there is any way around the fact that being downvoted and losing rewards is going to make people unhappy.