RE: Time for a little rant maybe?
The new balance is worth it in my opinion.
For most users, since they were introduced there is a huge net gain. Posts now that managed 10 cents before the fork are now worth 3 and 5 dollars. I've noticed a steady improvement of quality too because some people will put in the effort for a 3$ reward.
Normal people who used to do a lot of self-voting and trading stopped that too because they no longer need to join all these schemes to compete with bid buying.
There are those crap posts still getting 10$ from vote-trading or whatever. Glad OCDB is still trying to tackle this. The problem is they are backed by whales, so it scares people like me off (I still downvote clear abuse).
I am not the target of huge downvotes, I get the small ones everyone else gets. However, I am very skeptical of any blockchain solution beyond maybe increasing RC cost of free downvotes.
The people who want to remove free downvotes to stop trolls (they aren't bullies in my opinion) have the wrong idea. Those accounts mostly have < 20 SP and their upvotes are worthless anyway, so they would still use all their resources for 'paid' downvotes. Other accounts like MK are doing what they are doing for a purpose. Losing a fraction of the SBI upvote is worth having important tools like free downvotes. Without this, we may feel good, but we would be back to normal posts getting 10X smaller payouts. Front end solution to hid and ignore trolls is best.
I don't think it's a good idea to try and solve every single thing at the blockchain level. In fact, it's a terrible idea. The EIP was, in retrospect, a very good idea.
The free downvotes are needed to stop all bad actors. Sure, the bad actors have their free downvotes, too. But they can be countered with healing upvotes. I believe if the community delegates sufficient SP to projects like @ocdb or @curangel, the bad actors can be overpowered and forced to become neutral actors (I don't think most who have remained bad actors until now have it in them to become good actors.) or power down and leave the platform. We're at a critical stage. The last vestiges of #oldsteem need to be stamped out with decisive action.
When it comes to SBI, it has one redeeming feature which may cancel out the effect of SBI votes being content agnostic: it incentivizes user retention by spreading out the benefit from the upfront cost of buying SBI shares over a much longer time period.
This is also my point. Everyone wants a blockchain level solution. I only suggest adjusting RC requirements since this is one part of Steem that still needs a lot of tweaking. I guess it should wait until SMT and communities are introduced.
Free downvotes are definitely needed. I don't even care about healing until it becomes excessive. If someone is taking away less than 10% of your rewards, getting healed is pretty strange. The vast majority of downvotes going around aren't even worth 0.05 SBD unless you have huge upvotes from SBI.
I do like your opinion on SBI. I never thought about it retaining users in that way. However, ultimately it functions similar to how Steem Power works. Steem Power still takes 13 weeks to power-down which is pretty long term, especially with some people saying they want this to be 4 weeks...talk about counter-retentive.
Agreed. What's all the fuss about 10% getting redistributed by a downvote? It's different if someone gets totally demonetized for weeks or months. I'm glad to have seen such accounts being healed.
SBI is like Steem Power used for self-upvoting with no possibility of powering down. That may be good for user retention. But for me personally that's a reason not to use UBI myself.