<h5>Aah, the joys of beta! Could I request a different experiment?</h5>

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So by now, we all know about the experiment of whales not voting. The idea itself is an interesting one and I'm sure us little fishes enjoy having more power through our votes. However, this current experiment is probably not working out as planned by its creators.

A couple of misses:

*Not every whale is on board.*
I'm pretty sure that most people would not mind whales not voting for a while. Sure, some people would be sad about some income lost, but those would be less than everyone being sad now. That's simply because the downvoting that's going on currently to balance out the whales who aren't on board feels so negative. No one likes a downvote, but the reason given now won't be understood by many. I know we're in beta and experiments should be happening in this phase, but try telling that to every single person here. They won't understand, they just see income and reputation lost, due to an unreasonable downvote.

*Side effects of the downvotes*
Besides feeling downvotes are unfairly given, they have some other side effects. People's reputation declines through these downvotes. Sure, most of the time, it's less than the increase given by the whalevote, but the experiment here was only to see what would happen to rewards when whales don't vote. Besides this, the other side effect I've seen is that people's posts are greyed out once they get a whale vote. That's because, right after that, the downvotes come. This way, some perfectly fine posts will be missed, just because a whale voted for them.
Yesterday I checked the trending page's newer posts and also saw the downvotes did not hit everyone. I'm not sure if this is still going on, but you can imagine how that does not feel fair at all and it also defeats the purpose of the experiment.

__Counter proposal__
I'm not sure if this is technically possible, but wouldn't it be a much more interesting experiment to see what life's like without bots? Whales will always be here, but what if they do not follow bots around and instead actually upvote posts that they feel are deserving? This would upset the balance, but in a good way (I think). Bots have been set up and some people are lucky enough to have gathered a following of people *and* bots. I'm sure they've done the right things to get this attention, so they deserve(d) it. The problem arises when these people with their bot followings don't always post quality content. What if they were to just post a cat picture, or even just an article with the word "Test" in it, and nothing else? I'm sure people would not manually vote for such a post, but bots will. And knowing this person has a bot following, even people with their manual votes will be tempted to upvote, just to get the curration reward.

We are all invested in this platform. Whales most of all. I'm sure we all want to see it succeed, but to do so, we need less negativity (*The mean bots steal my money by downvoting for no reason*) and more quality content. If we were to be botless, we would only have manual votes. I know people would still try to *follow the money* by upvoting high reputation posters, but I'm hoping that this would lessen in time. Because when bots don't automatically vote and if whales were to actually check the quality of the content, before upvoting, these high reputation people would be less likely to get an upvote for every single post. I know a week might not be long enough to create this effect, but every whale who's up for this experiment and takes it seriously will have a huge impact on some lesser known authors. The effect in this case might simply be that they upvote quality content, no matter the reputation, meaning good authors will, at the very least, gain a good reputation increase. This would only help improve the platform's quality.

I'm sure people will find downsides to this experiment aswell. Some might count on their bot following. But in the end, good quality is important for this platform and I think you'd get your cash from manual votes aswell, as long as your posts are good. Afraid for your curration rewards when upvoting an unknown author? Upvote their post and then resteem it! If it's good quality, you help them gain a bigger following and your curration reward is saved.

Well anyway, that's just my two cents. I'm not expert on the platform, but I understand experiments happening in beta phase. We just need them to be well know before they start and we need everyone on board.

*How would you feel about a botless week?*

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