I could mention lots of ways also in real life that will boost your earnings, but would cause other to suffer the consequences. Ponzi schemes work that way. Steem is an open system - it is not Instagram where you pay for using the service by letting Facebook make personal files about you. Because it is decentralised people can find ways to exploit it and there will not be a central authority the reset the system. So the rules where changed after a consensus decision and now the community use the new rules to mob up.
Steem is an experiment not a public commodity.
Okay that makes some sense. Is the general consensus then that down votes are to punish people who are "misusing" the system rather than the way they are used on Reddit to simply "dislike" something? One of the users above said that they are the same as Reddit, but I haven't seen them used that way.
You can't really compare Reddit to Steemit. But people tend to use the analogy. Steemit is not some simple service, it is a wild anarchy in constant movement, but who knows where it will end. One steem has been worth a lot and could be so again in the future.
A downvote on reddit wont take money away from you, so it is used more carefully here. But when people do things that potentially can damage the whole community it is used rather ruthlessly.
I'll remove my downvote as you didn't do this on purpose and didn't get all these admittedly rather confusing changes. I guess you are more or less up to date now on how things are running.
Yes, I'll chalk this one up to education and a reminder to not be without a laptop for 3+ months, although to be honest not having a laptop was pretty nice in a lot of ways.
I can (only) imagine :)