Let's say you have 2 users each with 100,000 HP, Alice and Bob. Bob is voting selfishly, either his own posts or just randomly upvoting posts. Alice judges Bob's behaviour to be harmful enough that it is worth sacrificing some of her own rewards to counter Bob's.
Alice has tried talking to Bob, but didn't make any progress. In fact Bob started downvoting Alice's posts for merely suggesting that he should change his voting behaviour, which he says is censorship. Alice could in the current system downvote everything that Bob upvotes. We have seen how this plays out, it 'works' to a degree, but is pretty shitty for all involved, especially Carol the third party who posts paintings that she makes, who finds herself being upvoted by Bob and downvoted by Alice. As far as Carol is concerned, she is being told her posts are bad and abusive for no reason, and Alice is the bad guy.
Stake-vote-negation is a separate option from downvoting. Instead of having to direct her attention to everything Bob is doing, she applies a 30 day negation of 100,000 HP to Bob. That 100,000 HP is no longer counted for her own votes, but Bob also gets a -100,000 HP on his votes for 30 days. It's effectively timeout for both of them. Bob can still power down, he still gets the basic stake reward, but can't get the curation rewards he expects from his 100,000 HP.
Now to other users, Bob is just a minnow randomly voting on posts. Carol doesn't even notice that he is voting for her at all, nor does she notice Alice, who doesn't have to downvote her.
There are ways for stake-vote-negation itself to be abused. For example, a whale could maliciously negate the stake of random small users for no reason more than to troll the community. However this kind of abuse is itself quite easy to negate by other whales by providing delegations to users who experience this kind of abuse.
Stake vote negation also makes it easier for a bunch of smaller users to act collectively to police abuse. If there are 10 users, each with 20,000 HP, all 10 of them can each negate 10,000 HP of Bob's (100,000 in total). They can then keep posting on Hive like normal, but with only 10,000 HP of their own power for upvotes and curation. There isn't a need for one person to completely sacrifice their life on Hive.
Hmm, interesting. I guess it would in some ways be "worth it" if certain users really are a abusive and if there's users willing to sacrifice/park some of their HP to negate others. I like that there's a cost so others wouldn't just randomly negate other people's stake no matter if they're doing good or bad with it but there's also the question of those who don't care about the stake or curation returns, looking at some of xeldal's voting pattern lately and for a long time, for instance, he's been steady under 2-3% APR losing out on a lot of curation returns than if he'd just give up on his current ways and vote similarly to rancho instead on posts already doing well that others won't be able to effect their returns as much. It's almost like he's okay with it as long as it paints Marky/the platform in a bad picture.
Another idea I've been thinking about is if there'd be a downvote pool, or take half of the current one. I.e. Alice votes on Carol and Bob downvotes Alice's upvote but Carol still gets the author rewards that Alice sent her. This would be pretty limited (12.5% mana) so if certain accounts are really misbehaving/have misbehaved badly over a long period of time, there'd be more accounts able to negate their curation rewards without affecting authors. The thing about this idea, though, is that it opens up a lot more abuse vectors and accounts just trying to maximize curation rewards by utilizing their 12.5% mana to take from other's curation rewards even if unwarranted. Maybe instead of the "free" downvote pool it would cost upvote mana instead, so you'd still have to give up some curation returns but the rest of stakeholders got more instead by nulling the curation returns of the "bad behaving account". If their behavior changes the downvoter would naturally stop and go back to receiving more curation rewards while allowing the bad one turned good to earn curation rewards again. Dunno, there was a lot of talks in @dreamsteem's post so was just one idea I was experimenting with but too many loose ends.
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So in future I need to get in touch with (circle jerking) whales even more?
Or my stake will just be negated
"However this kind of abuse is itself quite easy to negate by other whales by providing delegations to users who experience this kind of abuse."
great
sadly I only got a few delegations in my 5 years here
and A LOT OF ANGRY WHALES or ORCAS
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Can Bob just delegate to one of his other accounts, and then just keep voting?
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