Give greater flexability to the steemit experience. Strengthen brand. Keep natural feeling of up/down voting. Add "steemit" (something new)
There was some talk about including a simple metric of the number of up and down votes on a post/comment, like you'd see on reddit, apart from the rewards metric we have have now displayed as $$$. I think this is a good idea but I'd take it a step further
I'd like to suggest keeping the up and down vote buttons, but have them only affect the simple front-end based reddit style metric. In addition to this we could have a "Steemit" button that is essentially what the up vote does currently. It would trigger positive rewards.
The reason Im suggesting this is because currently the feeling I have when deciding whether to upvote or downvote something is too complicated internally because there is a dollar reward associated with it. I'd like to be able to just throw an up or down vote out there as a simle "like" / "dislike" and have it not really affect the post/comments rewards. While if it's truly valuable I might also "steemit". You could then put a red "X" or something in the corner out of the way for something equivalent to the current downvote negative rewards.
So a post might have more downvotes(dislikes) then upvotes(likes) but still get a steem reward because it was a valuable contribution.
Is this an unnecessary distinction/change? Good idea / Bad idea? Would it affect how you use steemit? Would it lessen how often the steem rewards function is used? Do you see any benefit to separating the upvote and positive steem rewards; separating the downvote from negative steem rewards?