I didn't expext you to react anymore. Thanks for this detailed reply!
As such, I use my downvoting power to nudge down rewards that I see as costing us more than the value the post is likely to generate.
That's an interesting one. How do you measure the value it is likely to generate?
Is it the exposure to attract new users on Hive?
When I'm honest, my blogs with $5 rewards are unlikely to bring $5 in return for the community in ways of exposure. But do my posts need to be downvoted then as well?
I know you are downvoting posts that have way more rewards than that, and I think it's good that you're doing this.
I do question myself how any post that has over $50 rewards is going to have a return for the community, let alone posts with over $100. Maybe indeed the posts that are not a dime a dosin.
So I hope that my own downvotes serve as a nudge, and others who likewise agree that these (or other) posts are a drag on the value of Hive (which I'm sure we all want to go up) will follow along and also make small downvotes.
They surely are a good nudge. Only the anger and retalliation downvotes can cause stop me from doing it too.
I've seen too many downvote wars and I don't want my account that I've built up in years being destroyed because I downvote a post make the rewards more fair in my eyes.
I think I'm not the only one in this and that makes it difficult to trigger a change.
That's why I ask myself in my blog whether it would be a task for the larger curation initiatives to not only upvote, but also downvote posts.
It's an opinion but a question I ask myself in forming this opinion is how much would any for-profit (or even sustainable non-profit) web site pay for like content, and then adjusting down for the fact that we don't directly generate ad revenue and most of those other sites do. For things like personal blogs, non-remarkable photography, routine (often mass produced by the same few posters) travelogues, the answer is very little, certainly not $50 per post.
Maybe in an ideal world, but I don't personally have time to pay attention to those. I can definitely see the clear imbalance in many high payout posts.
Also, I'd argue that wide distribution of small amounts of rewards has it's own value in keeping people engaged. But a high concentration of rewards to a few posters without much of a following doesn't do that. That's another reason to nudge down the high payouts. Not everyone is necessarily aware, but the way the Hive reward pool works mechanically, any rewards reduced from high payouts by downvotes goes directly to increase the broader small payouts.
I do wonder how that technically works. When someone has voted on my post and someone downvotes it with the same amount, the money isn't added up to other posts, is it. And it also doesn't give the rest of the curators more to spend.
All of the payouts come from a pool that is a fixed size at any point in time. When one post gets less, others get more. Downvoting one post is equivalent to upvoting every other post getting a payout by a small amount, assuming it were actually feasible to do that.
Ah, so when (hypothetically) there are only two posts with votes, both with $5 rewards and one gets zeroed out by a downvote, the payout for the other increases to $10?
It's interesting to know how it really works. I think many people don't know how it works.
Yes that example is correct.
Another interesting point is that if one post gets massively more upvotes, its rewards will increase to say 9.99 and the other will decrease to 0.01 without being downvoted.
Downvotes and upvotes are both ways of allocating the pool between posts.