You need to decide on methodology. Everyone needs to follow it. If you cannot cancel out 1:1 with your flags to offset the people not participating then the data is going to be skewed. Also having to flag has unintended impact on the platform/community in other ways that will alter behavior, and thus corrupt the results.
If you want to do a test to see what it would be like with no whales voting. Get Dan/Ned involved and have them remove the ability for people over a certain steem power to vote (up OR down). Agree to a time period for the test, and apply it.
Then there is no guesswork. You would only be measuring the impact of no whale votes.
If you cannot guarantee a controlled environment then your results are going to be skewed and people's interpretation of that data will be opinion and speculation.
The platform is in beta as I understand it though I saw another person refer to it as being in alpha. We can do tests, but PLEASE communicate with the community about it. Don't just start doing it, and don't do it in a completely disorganized manner.
Right now with this short time for the experiment we can tell there is definitely something that would likely happen with this experiment. However, the results are so muddied by people not participating, and thus being countered by whales who are participating by them DOWN VOTING/Flagging those posts. Flagging is not psychologically the inverse of an up vote. That should be obvious by the reactions it gets. As soon as you had to start doing that you might as well have called off the experiment as the data collected will be meaningless and based purely on opinion and speculation. There are now too many different variables besides simply "what if no whales voted".
I'm all for experiments. Yet you need to state methodology and get EVERYONE that is part of the group you are testing to agree to them. If you can't do that then you need Dan/Ned to enforce it via code for a period of time.
If everyone is not participating your attempts to correct it just further corrupt the results.
At the moment the experiment may actually be harming the platform. That isn't to say a controlled experiment would harm the platform. This is far from controlled so we cannot know.
I will be limiting my effort on my posts until this "Experiment" is concluded. I don't mind the no whale votes, and I like experimenting. It is not about payout. I do not want to put forth effort to have it flagged at a higher weight than any whales that may have up voted it, or worse have it flagged when a whale didn't even up vote it.
Prior to today I'd really only ever had a post flagged by the @asshole bot. So if you find a way to do an actual controlled experiment you have my support. Until then I'll likely refrain from serious effort on content.
I do write when I am inspired so it is also possible I'll write something anyway because it is like a living thing that if I do not breathe life to it by writing about it, it'll drive me insane, or I'll go insane thinking I might forget about it if I don't write about it.
I also converted some steem to SBD yesterday so I'd have some SBD to promote posts. I will not be promoting posts while this flagging is occurring.
Steem On!
