Once again, I do thank you for your engagement.
And, yes, I do agree that we disagree. My goal here, though, is to discern and discover some meaningful feasible space wherein we do agree, or at least where we can agree.
A single whale CAN nuke SOME posts.
On this, we both agree.
But they have to prioritize which posts, and that's consensus. The ones they're nuking do not have consensus. The others that necessarily survive with successful payouts are consensus.
So what you're saying here is that any post that gets passed over by 'any and all whale DVs' has thusly received the consensus blessing of all whales and thus is allowed to bathe in the HIVE inflation reward pool.
I think it's important that we define our terms. When I use the term 'consensus', this is what I mean:
Consensus decision making is a creative and dynamic way of reaching agreement between all members of a group. ... [A] group using consensus is committed to finding solutions that everyone actively supports, or at least can live with. This ensures that all opinions, ideas and concerns are taken into account.
(italics added) Source
Given that definition (which you are, of course, free to disagree with), one could say that a form of consensus is being reached on those posts that are passed over. However, one cannot say that any form of consensus is being reached on those posts that are being nuked. Consensus is thwarted because there is no viable (i.e. sustainable) mechanism wherein dissenting voices (i.e. those who believe a nuked post DOES warrant a portion of the reward pool) can have their "opinions ideas and concerns ... taken into account."
In other words, we do not have consensus on the overall distribution of the reward pool. What we have is a semblance of consensus that, in reality, gives unchecked veto power to each and every whale. Each and every whale is free to single out individual accounts and/or ideas that they dislike, and completely and totally remove them from participation in the reward pool.
And, whereas other whales are essentially defenseless in combatting the unilateral nuking of individual accounts and/or ideas, this enables each whale who chooses to exercise this power to systematically eliminate his/her enemies by simply being focused and persistent.
This is exemplified by the situation with @themarkymark, @newsflash, and @xeldal. The current protocol affords no mechanism wherein the innumerable accounts who value marky's contributions can have their voices heard.
A better consensus mechanism for the overall distribution of the reward pool is what I am and will continue vying for. A change to the mechanism so that true consensus can be more readily achieved.
No protocol will be perfect. However, I am convinced that we can do better.
This is consistent with the sentiments @theycallmedan mentioned in this post in August 2021.
I have some additional ideas that I believe will further improve on Dan's proposed Counter-DV concept, which I hope to share soon.
Here are two relevant excerpts from Dan's post:
While downvotes are necessary for PoB to function in a decentralized way, and by adding 2.5 free downvotes, we have given plenty of ammo to the "good guys" - but inadvertently, we also gave plenty of ammo to the "bad guys." Keep in mind; we are spreading a governance token here; no one large entity should be able to censor governance distribution on a select group of people, IE "targetted bulling" - emotions should never lead to the ability to suffocate another's rewards in perpetuity without a good ability to defend vs. it.
The main issue is to counter downvote abuse has an opportunity cost to the upvoter trying to help. Under the new flat ruleset of curation rewards, the only thing that can lower your known rate of return is downvotes. Again, asking someone to do good, and in return, they get diluted is not a good business deal, and no one will take it up constantly, nor should they. Good people acting good for the sake of good at the cost of dilution end up becoming irrelevant power-wise; thus, their acts of good are useless in terms of having an effect. We saw what happened when you removed the opportunity cost of downvoting; people used them to help the platform.
So I propose a few options.
One free upvote per day that can only be used on a post that is already downvoted and can't surpass the downvote amount. The post cannot be voted on twice, meaning everyone who voted before the downvote can't revote the post with the free upvote.
For example, say a post is nuked to zero, the exploiter cant use the free upvote because the exploiter already self-voted and cant self-vote the same post twice, so all the bad actors trying to exploit a post cant re-exploit it.
However, if the post is nuked to zero by bad actors, outside good actors can come in and use their free upvote to counter.
A bad actor has no good outside votes, only self-votes; therefore, the only thing that can be downvoted is the attacker's own vote; therefore, they cannot use the free vote to counter. Since the free upvote can only be used on a downvoted post, you can't use it to earn anything, IE it's not like a free spam post upvote per day for attackers.
This is doing the same thing we did with free downvotes except for upvotes; it removes the opportunity cost to reverse downvote abuse. In practice, we know if you let good people do good without being penalized, they will do good.
EDIT* 8/11/21 - thanks to @smooth who rightfully pointed out an obvious attack vector here that I somehow overlooked. "You can split your stake into two accounts, post with both, upvote one post with each account, and then use the other account to counter downvotes." - This makes this defense actually more of an attack vector by giving abusers the ability to recoup losses. - But there may be a way to do it in a different way and accomplish the same goal. Further from smooth: "I think it would be possible to take the downvote curation reward penalty only from those upvotes chronologically before the downvote, so upvotes to counter the downvote wouldn't be penalized."
No, non-whales can and do downvote as well, and can have a large impact on rewards especially the moderate payouts that don't have whale upvotes.
If whales upvote and bestow a large windfall on a post (in fact even a single whale can), then it's fitting that other whales can also downvote that same post, no?
The problem I have with your argument is that @newsflash (at least previously, if I understand correctly that it powered down) and @xeldal are extremely large stake accounts. They have a large, one could even say enormous (relatively speaking) investment in the chain. If, for whatever reason 'good' or 'bad', they happen not to believe that @themarkymark should receive rewards, it's pretty unlikely that @themarkymark receiving rewards could ever be said to have consensus. You can adjust things around the edges somewhat, but that fundamental fact is hard to avoid.
I don't disagree with any of that!
For what it is worth, number of accounts does not matter at all. A swarm of 10000 low stake bot accounts should have little to no influence. I prefer to speak of stake or some other demonstrably effective reputation mechanism (extremely hard), and not 'accounts'.
As I understand it, @newsflash and @xeldal targeted @themarkymark as retaliation. They decided to "go after" @themarkymark because of his voting behavior on other posts that they didn't like. This is a negative outcome whether it succeeds or not: @themarkymark, as with anyone else, should be free to express his position positive or negative on posts without fear of retaliation. The most likely solution to retaliation that I see as plausible is making votes anonymous. It's widely done in the real world in part for this reason (also because it inhibits vote buying). Technically this is difficult in a decentralized chain but certainly not impossible. It's more likely to practically achievable after moving social voting to a layer two app rather than trying to build more and more complexity into the base chain.
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