It Is Dangerous - Remove Revote Penalty is an Epidemic Waiting to Ravage the Platform
The informations in this article are my personal views, I put this in writing to communicate my mind to like minded people out here.
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Problem:
Under the current system, if you remove a vote you forfeit all future curation rewards on that post even if you revote the post prior to payout. In other words, if you vote 10% on a post and later decide you want to reward it 20%, you no longer earn curation rewards.
This behavior is to prevent users voting a minimal amount on a large number of posts and later increasing the vote on successful posts to maximize curation rewards. By forfeiting all potential curation rewards when you unvote a post, this behavior is not attractive.
I do not believe you should be penalized to change your vote either higher or lower, outside of course the loss in voting power for the additional votes.
Proposed Solution
This topic has been discussed a lot in the past, and the original developers agreed it should be changed and planned on changing it on a future hard fork.
The way I propose this works, is by completely removing the forfeit curation rewards penalty. If you remove a vote, and later revote a post the time of your last vote is used when calculating curation rewards. This means if you vote after 15 minutes and remove it and revote it 2 days later, this last vote will be used to calculate your position in the curation rewards pool. This eliminates any way to manipulate curation rewards.
Under this change, voting power will still be used on all votes. So to vote 10% and remove it for a 20% vote would require 30% voting power. I also propose this change as well, only charging the voting power delta for new votes.
For example, if you vote 10% and later change it to 20%, you would be charged another 10% voting power, a total of 20%. If you voted 10%, and then later change it to 5%, you would still have expended 10% and the 2nd vote wouldn't refund any voting power. This is another change that was under consideration in the past and was well received.
Active exploitation in the wild
There is also an active exploitation being used to take advantage of a side effect of the current behavior. When a user unvotes a post, their curation rewards are forfeit but still exist in the curation pool granting all curators more curation rewards than their current stake entitles them to. I know of at least one user that exploits this unique behavior.
Summary
This proposal recommends the following changes in a future (hopefully next) hard fork.
Remove unvoting curation forfeiture
Votes reset timestamp used for curation calculation
Only charge voting power delta to increase vote weight
I do not expect any proofs of plagiarism in the comments this time as everyone has read this recently anyway.
I had no idea about this. I thought that the timing of upvoting no longer mattered. If timing no longer matters then I don't understand how changing one's vote should affect their ability to earn curation rewards on a post. I also don't understand what you mean when you speak of active exploitation. Genuine questions here from me. How does it benefit someone to upvote, remove their vote, thereby supposedly increasing the curation pool for others but removing any benefit from themselves. Why would they do this? No benefit to themselves. I wonder if @jaxsonmurph can also provide any insight? EDIT: happy to upvote once I understand what I am upvoting lol :-)
I believe this technique was established to prevent users from abusing the voting system and specifically for down voting, so that malicious down voters couldn't give a low down vote of say 1% then come back and give a higher down vote say 100% closer to the rewards pay-out date hence wiping any possible earnings from the creators post. I may Be wrong.
But vice versa somebody could upvote as described 10% and later improve that upvote to gain further curation rewards, IMO I believe we should all pay close attention to the value of a vote we give to users the first time, whether it be a plus or a minus and should have a no need to go back to that post and improve the vote, unless it's specifically for the purpose of gaining more rewards, which in itself I believe is wrong, but again I May Be Wrong this is only my opinion.
The fact this proposal is coming from a fairly new account as in one week old is troublesome, this is obviously written by someone that has another account which is in itself deceptive, otherwise they would have no interest in curation as they have not yet become a curator.
I understand that the rewards is what motivates most users and maximising them through curation is indeed a good thing, but it should not be a users sole purpose for being in a community or tribe, there are many other factors to take into account.
I appreciate the tag in this matter from @samsmith1971 an hope my understanding gives some relevance to your doubt, personally in either case I would not change my vote whether it be a plus or a minus.
My vote is my word if I like something I read I give it wholeheartedly once and once only, I never go back to change that to manipulate either the rewards another user can earn or my own rewards, unless of course it is for plagerizm, In that instance it doesn't matter to me what rewards I can earn, only that my vote prevents another user from abusing the integrity of the token in this case #pob