Hi Abigail,
thank you for joining the poll and for sharing your take on the matter.
Your judgement on allowing free downvotes appears logical under your premise that they are an instrument of punishment. My understanding of downvotes, however, is fundamentally different. Let me try to explain.
Downvotes express the request of a stakeholder to correct the current proposal for the reward of a contribution. Just like an upvote does. When someone hits the publish button on Steem, the community of stakeholders is called to review and modify a constantly changing proposal for the reward of that post. This review goes on over a period of 7 days and it deals with nothing else but a proposal. There is nothing to give, nothing to take, nothing to reward, nothing to punish. It’s just collecting stake-weighted input to come up with a final consensus on what the actual payout should be. No one should feel entitled to receive what a proposal suggests at any time within this 7d period. Because it’s subject to change until it’s final.
Now, to engage in this review stakeholders have only three possibilities to express their view. Upvote, Downvote and No vote. And now I get to the point. What happens to this review if one expression comes at a cost while another doesn’t? In other words, how will the outcome of this review change if one as to pay for saying „less“ while getting payed for saying „more“. No way this could work out. And we were all able to convince ourselves for a long time that it didn’t.
Even now after the introduction of the EIP these three ways to engage in the reward proposal review are incentivized differently, since only one of them offers curation rewards. Still, taking away at least the penalty on the downvote has gone a long way towards improving reward evaluation and thus content discovery.
Reintroducing a cost on downvotes will again take them out of the set of expressions we have in said review and would turn our shared community pool back into the self-service shop it was for a too long time.
Needless to say that the above is all my personal take on the matter. Thanks again for sharing yours.
(I take the liberty of tagging a few of the other commenters here, since what I wrote here might be an adequate response to their input too.
@don-t @roleerob @xpilar @ianballantine @flysky @siphon @wulff-media @purplealyss @cflclosers @lighteye @gamemods @suntree @agmoore @gunnarheilmann)
Good afternoon @shaka,
Thank you for taking the time to share your views here with me/us :) I found it very insightful and it has definitely provided me with a different angle from which to approach this topic.
Best,
Abigail.