"Are you capable of coding curation rewards for down voters?"
If I understand correctly, that would be more than a matter of coding. Such a deep change to protocol might require another hard fork, and all the pains and friction that comes with that.
Still, I like the idea.
"Why are down votes discriminated against?
Are they second class votes?"
It would seem so. It seems that you and I may agree that downvotes are as useful and helpful as upvotes. Unfortunately I find that we are in the minority.
"Instead of building defensively to mitigate the damage of abusers, let's incentivize abuse hunting."
I really like the sound of that. The incentives for abuse seem much greater than the incentives to fight abuse. At least the incentives for abuse are more direct if nothing else.
However I'm not so sure about the mechanism you describe, though it isn't very specifically expounded.
Currently, as I understand it, curation rewards come from a portion of rewards a post gets overall. Downvotes don't generate any post rewards to draw curation rewards from, so where would the rewards come from? How would they be scaled?
Your vote is worth x.xx, whether that is up or down.
50% of that goes to curation.
The side with the most weight gets paid out.
I think what we need to ascertain is the abuse vectors, and whether that abuse is less harmful than the current protocol.
Right now SFR is way over powered, there isn't near as much abuse, at the level we handle.
The whales, of course, still have impunity to self vote, circle jerk, and flag us all to oblivion for making eye contact.
I think adding rewards to negative curation will liven up the abuse hunting game.
It will also allow bad acting large stakeholders more rope to hang us with.
But, it is a worthwhile discussion, imo.