No, downvotes will not be needed and vote-trading in any form will not work (incl bid-bots). Any stakeholder will generate the same amount of HIVE and some of that can be given away into the ecosystem, without actually taking something away.
This will also get rid of self-voting, sock-puppets, and any other form of trying to game the reward pool.
I see. But we get rid of self upvotes by making the default a self upvote right? So if you do nothing you get your rewards and that's that.
It definitely is simpler that the complex system we have right now, and probably better. But big changes are always scary.
Remember that the current rewards pool is based on "Proof of Brain" aka a group of brains can determine what content is good and worthy to reward. This is theoretically true, but as the group of brains gets bigger and the number of vultures also increases, this starts to get out of hand.
If Hive were used by a company, even a pretty big one, due to the fact that the identity of the participants is known and that bad actors would be punished, there wouldn't be any situations where whales could abuse their power, while staying in anonymity.
But as Steem and now Hive has grown in users, the potential for abuse and toxicity is increasing rapidly. And I don't want to tell anybody: "you can't downvote this". If it's their opinion that they want to downvote a certain post, they should be able to do so. But this is resulting in bad user experience. Do we want that? I would say: no.
The same is true for "self-voting". Look, if you invest a ton of money into HIVE and you want to min/max the sh*t out of it; then the last thing you want is to be targeted by self-pronounced "hive police" or "abuse-hunters". Even if they think they're doing the right thing: how many people have been pushed away because they didn't uphold the same standard as the "core-community" (which included me at some point).
IMHO, if we want Hive to succeed, we need to allow anybody to invest in HIVE and prosper with it; regardless if they want to do it for their own gain or to improve Hive. Otherwise, it's like saying: "I want free-speech, but that opinion should be censored".
I have to agree with you. It does create a lot of friction.
When I bought steem originally, I didn't know about all of the social conventions and was self-upvoting. Then I got blacklisted and downvoted to get 0 rewards.
I understood and just created a new account, but it definitely could have caused someone else to just sell and leave.
But I also wonder if doing such a change can have other consequences which we can't think of right now.