I have read all this very carefully. It will be hard to solve if we want to maintain freedom of speach. In theory those downvotes should be balanced by upvotes as there usually there are two sides of the coin. Duality is very strong rule in the universe itself. Black / White. Cold / Hot. Good / Evel. While it may sound a bit too much philosophical it means that each system has to ballance itself. If we start changing the rules and giving more power to the upvotes and less to downvotes that would already be censorship in it's essence that goes against the very principles of freedom and decentralisation.
While flagging and downvoting is a way of censorship and i am sure it is an extremely unpleasnt feeling after one puts so much heart into it, it's still upmto the community to ballance the scales.
In this instance you have my full upvote as i personally like your articles. But just by gaining support we can outweigt different opinnions as "the truth" is a subjective term that depends on personal experiences that can not be changed even by fact. That strong it is.
Continuing to this i have a question that maybe somebody could answer. If we want to maintaim complete freedom of speech. What would happen theoretically is somebody would buy 100 000 000 of steem power and start downvoting exactly everyting that is being posted. I mean exactly everything. It might be a lot for an individual but some government could easily buy all steem market cap in a blink of an eye if steemit freedom hot out of hand and that would not suit it.
Is there any way technically to do anything against such an attack and if so would not that go against the very concept of steemit.
Thank you for your continued support and that's a great question. I would hope that there is something built in that would counter such an attack but if there isn't one.. now would definetely be a good time for the creators or managers of steemit to come up with one.
Well, remember that the witnesses control the code; the blockchain itself. Votes for witness are stake weighted too, and this means that anyone with enough money could just buy the accounts from the founders with their mined stakes that are the bulk of the Steem in existence, and just vote in witnesses that would run any code they wanted, and make Steem, Steemit, SMT's, Busy.org - everything that uses the Steem blockchain - theirs.
It's called a Sybil attack, that takes control of the blockchain by having over 50% of the stake, or on other blockchains, nodes, or hash power, and Steem is the simplest to take over.
It would cost money. But not government money. Fakebook could do it. Alphabet (Google) could do it. Amazon could do it. A small cabal of these guys could do it, and hardly feel it.
When you have $10B's, $50M is change.