Not rocket science and pretty much off the cuff:-
Most successful social media platforms don’t show the usernames of upvoters. Facebook is the exception here as far as I know, so it’s likely okay to have transparent upvoting. Anonymous is alright as well, considering that’s generally how it works everywhere else.
All successful social media platforms don’t show the usernames of downvoters. I can’t find any exception, so it’s likely sound to have anonymous downvoting.
With anonymous downvoting at least, we may get a better representation of our subjective evaluation which is a key ingredient in a functional content discovery and rewards platform. And there’s less friction?
How to achieve anonymous voting?
If we stick to shoving and computing every post and vote into the blockchain until the end of time, I’m sure there are legit ways to make votes anonymous. But it may be too expensive for the chain.
Or maybe an easier way to achieve this with the bonus of great upside and little downside:-
Take Steem’s posting / voting / reward mechanisms off the blockchain. Funnel the current reward pool into agreed upon central layer(s) via SPS. This central layer acts like Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, etc dealing with posting / voting / reward calculations off-chain.
This way, we can already have the usual massive scalability, manageability, and rapid iteration-ability of successful social media platforms without too much of the unnecessary burden, bloat, and cost of the blockchain. No more account creation problems and just about anyone can immediately engage with the platform. Users can link up their blockchain account with the off-chain account anytime to have their SP accounted for.
The central layer doesn’t have to show the names of upvoters and downvoters. And votes are not logged and not computed on the chain. Anonymous, except to the central entity as usual. Problem solved. Virtually instant voting and posting too without that couple of seconds delay.
Shouldn’t we avoid too much reliance on trusted third parties for a blockchain project?
I’m only talking about the removal or reduction / minimization of the posting key stuff here: posting and / or voting related to the author / curator reward pool side of things. Not the active key stuff: DPOS witness voting, SPS, and the rest of the basic blockchain functionalities that are pretty much the same as Bitcoin will remain intact.
Sure, we lose the censorship resistant part of posting and voting by having it off-chain, but the transactions / memos on the blockchain will remain to be uncensorable, of course.
Perhaps the worst thing that could happen with the reward pool being funneled to a one-party central layer solution is the mishandling of funds (voting power and order scorekeeping, reward calculation and distribution, etc). But that’s just about 6% (or less in the future) inflation risk for so much upside. It's more likely the central layer will do their job properly. Plus, the community can re-vote where the reward pool goes to if the central layer is compromised.
Steem would still remain to have utility on curation rewards and Bitcoin-like blockchain functionalities on the account level, along with transactional bandwidth. And perhaps the SMT stuff. Still a blockchain with a decentralized currency. With this solution, we just pretty much decouple the app side of things away from the chain and have minimal interaction with it other than for validating SP amount and to distribute rewards, etc.
If anon voting sucks, then what about the other point on having the posting / voting stuff off-chain with the gain of scalability regardless?
Good idea? Bad idea? Everything must be on the chain? Your thoughts?
Image from Pexels.
Disclaimer: Not to be taken as financial advice.
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