But I am unaware of a good reason for downvotes on Steemit in their present form. for spam, plagiarism, etc., a downvote that is based on reputation, rather than wealth, has a use case, and can easily be applied by the community I will allow that it is probably pretty satisfying to crush some asshole that has it coming. I'm not convinced that's a benefit to the community.
In an upvote only instance abuse could never be countered, BUT more importantly, people could methodically game the system for their own ends, guaranteed return with one bot, then devise endless other ways to delegate power or collusive vote, simply draining the rewards pool, and effectively it will make it every bot for themselves under the same prerogative, you have to be stupid not to get returns and self vote pretty much, because the rules of the game have changed to upvote away. If you introduce a downvote, then you have the option of choosing NOT to earn curration and lose voting power, simply to keep such behavior in check, the spam, the abuse comes second to that function.
So to simply say, people would not benefit from having to compete with insane or big accounts that effectively can chose either to rape the reward pool for themselves without any resistance or effort, or not to, and be forced to curate sub par things in efforts of marginalizing the stake the bot self voters would hold in votes from the reward pool. That's not the kind of place conducive to community, every man or woman for their own bot.
In a community there are behaviors that get frowned upon, people can chose to not even see your comments if they mute you, not just to ignore you, but hide you, and that's a great function. But this place being based on transparency, it's fundamentally wrong to ban people, and because it's based on decentralization it's not going to have admins or people with powers that can be abused, and prone to "teacher's pet" and other cockstroking.
Perhaps he will be silenced, cowed by the economic impact of the vote.
Perhaps, but then he only cared about economic impact and hardly about "speaking up".
I don't believe that makes Steemit better.
You can judge a whole platform on the actions of one.
There need to be diverse voices, or there is no point in conversation.
No, conversations don't need diverse voices, conversations can carry on in absence of diversity. I don't have the need to express "needs", or cry for should, because diversity by itself doesn't mean anything, especially if that person cares more about money for example as opposed to speaking up. Or if they want people to gang up on people, however misunderstood the platform, the fact that his diverse self was arguing ganging up on people, hardly like such a thing to happen, speaks of their character, and I don't know who'd NEED that in a conversation. But in case this wasn't about that, or how steemit doesn't have enough the end is neigh rhetoric, he can try all he wants, but believe it when people aren't going to buy his crap and flag him and crap all over his crap, because they are allowed to chose, do I want this crap promoted in the community, and they vote, and if more people vote against them they simply live with that crap, but if nobody or very few vote against it, then that crap gets to live with those few from the community.
That was a lesson in crap, under this cunt's post.
Thanks for you substantive response, that provided me information I didn't have before. No one has mentioned, nor have I read, that downvoting costs voting power, until you (I am just about to tackle the white paper, if I can stop myself from commenting).
I have noted that a whale not self voting would be essentially throwing away $100's or $1000's weekly, and that this is a strong motivation for them to NOT vote on the posts of others. Recently @jerrybanfield posted that, instead of selfvoting for an estimated $1800/week, he was going to upvote others posts. This made quite a stir.
The fact that it made quite a stir shows that it's not a common practice.
I still do not understand how krill like myself having a downvote might have any affect on the reward pool. The fact that 1% of accounts receive 99% of author rewards (at least up to HF19) shows that whales upvote their posts and do get almost all the new Steem thereby.
Downvotes seem to have nothing to do with it.
Your (colorful) explanation of how downvotes discourage content you find objectionable is more understandable than how I have viewed that discouragement in the past. I will give the issue a lot more thought.
Thanks!
As to the extent of rewards inuring to a handful of accounts, this is a chart provided by @aggroed just before HF19.
The figures I cited came from the post where I got the chart, IIRC. Regardless of the mathematical precision of the stated figure, the chart very clearly shows that those figures cannot be far off.
As I recall, @aggroed estimated that after HF19 he expected author rewards to improve such that 93% of author rewards would be captured by less than 10% of accounts.
I have not addressed bots, and do not know how they may be, or not be, contributing to this concentration of rewards in so few accounts. However, HF19 reduced the number of votes requisite to fully draining vote power to 10 from 40, which to me indicates that reducing the manual voting necessary to maximize financial rewards of self voting was the intention, as bots don't care how long it takes.
This would also reduce the necessary number of posts required to make, in order to have posts to self vote, and those posts are not written by bots.
My vote, as you can see, is insubstantial as a means of discouraging the production of content. I do not agree that it represents a meaningful force in comparison to votes backed by $1000's, or $M's of SP.
Thanks again for helping me to better understand these issues.