Author Topic: Approval voting and negative votes  (Read 3605 times)

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Offline alphaBar

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BM's argument was "This way everyone should vote as he does now AND vote-down everyone else".
Also unlimited negative votes might be technically difficult.

Approval voting with negative votes could be implemented if you can have unlimited negative votes (and maybe even if you limit the negative votes to 101).

In a situation where the user upvotes N delegates and downvotes any number of other delegates, if the client auto-upvotes the 101-N non-negative delegates directly below the highest negative vote that would be sufficient to solve the problem I've outlined. The only reason to have unlimited negative votes would be to allow for a scenario when a large number of consecutive downvotes exist. Let's say for example the user down-votes the first 300 delegates. The client would then upvote delegates 301-401. This would be far more effective than the current system in quickly voting out bad actors. Really the fact that we show negative votes in the UI is by itself an illusion, so we should do our best to "translate" a negative vote into the most intuitive effect.

Offline emski

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BM's argument was "This way everyone should vote as he does now AND vote-down everyone else".
Also unlimited negative votes might be technically difficult.

Approval voting with negative votes could be implemented if you can have unlimited negative votes (and maybe even if you limit the negative votes to 101).

Offline alphaBar

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I was thinking about my voting habits in BTSX and it dawned on me that I've never voted for anywhere near 101 delegates. I understand that approval voting is probably the best option, but one of the benefits of allowing negative votes is the fact that "bad actors" can be voted out quickly. One thing many people do not realize is that in order to most effectively "vote out" a bad actor in approval voting, you MUST submit at least 101 positive votes. If your "positive" votes are already ranked higher than the delegate you wish to vote out (very likely), your votes have no net effect on the ability of the community to remove the "bad actor". The attention span of the average person is too short to track 101 trusted delegates, and most people will converge on a handful of trusted delegates in the long run. The result is that delegates ranked in the bottom half of the 101 active delegates are actually selected by a tiny minority of stakeholders. Even those who wish to "vote them out" are probably unknowingly having no effect on the ranking of those "bad actor" delegates.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but currently the "negative" vote has no impact unless you select "Vote as Delegates Recommended," an option that many/most users do not select. I propose changing the default behavior of the negative vote in the client to the following:

*Allow a maximum of 101 positive votes and an unlimited number of negative votes
*If there are no negative votes the behavior of the client remains the same
*If there are any number of negative votes, the client always submits 101 positive votes. The positive votes are selected in the following way: The client "votes up" all positive votes selected by the user (N), plus uses the remaining votes (101-N) to vote up delegates ranked lower than the first negative vote. In this way, the client interprets the user's intent (to vote down a delegate) and selects the best slate of positive votes to make that outcome occur.

I haven't read through all of the discussions on the voting algorithm so please correct me if I am wrong on any of this.