@anomadsoul, it's one of those issues that has no clear cut lines.

Years back, I remember the first post I made that finally got some substantial upvotes suddenly got severely trimmed by a major flag over "disagreement with rewards." At the time it felt like a case of someone with a lot of voting power looking at my post and deciding "This guy usually makes about $2.00 on his posts, so he shouldn't make more than $2.00 for a post." In FACT, it was part of the now infamous "Whale Experiment" on Steem in pre-HF-16 days.

Since then, I have been on the receiving end of an automated downvote trail that decided that every time I get upvoted by a particular account that had an upvote bot service on Steem * a couple of years ago*, but now manually curates on Hive... I should have my rewards trimmed by $8.00. That I just find annoying, because it's based on laziness and ignorance... a failure to realize things have changed and not reprogramming your bot.

I did get on the edge of a downvote war once because someone "volatile" declared that I was "a retard" for suggesting people might step back and consider alternative solutions (to fighting and dropping flags on everyone) to solve their differences.

I agree that we need downvotes. I have no idea how to remove the "grade school playground battles" from the equation. The whole "I'm going to flag all YOUR posts because you upvoted so-and-so's post and if you like someone I hate, I hate you, too!" IS bad for the community... because it definitely does discourage engagement by less experienced users. In a reasonably sane world, people outgrow that level of bullshit when they graduate high school, but we don't have a "reasonably sane" microcosm here.

Free Speech venues attract people who tend to be outspoken. If all you talk about is growing roses and how cute kittens are , you don't NEED a place like Hive. You might like it, but you don't need it. You can say that stuff anywhere, but you're still welcome to say it here.

Answers? I've considered whether instituting a code change where any downvote above a certain threshold (0.05? 0.10?) MUST be given manually and accompanied by a written explanation? It's a psychological thing... if you want to "kill" your enemy, you don't get to take a sniper shot from a mile away, you HAVE to walk up to them with a knife, look them in the eyes and cut their throat. Of course, some will say "I can just create 1000 accounts and downvote someone 1000 times!"

Seriously? If anyone is that worked up, get some psychiatric help!

Of course, the problem is that it would make it a lot of work to manually contain someone who (for example) is peppering $20 upvotes on their own 1-word comments, added to 3-year old posts everyone has forgotten about...

Philosophically speaking, it's a really tricky area. We deal a lot with freedom and free speech and censorship issues here because of the lack of a central authority. And yet, the topics typically posted by people seeking freedom from censorship also tends to be on "hot button" issues that bring out strong feelings. Perhaps what it really points to is society's general lack of skills/tools in having actual problem solving dialogue rather than just an angry exchange of insults... and downvotes.

To end this... a dear friend is 40-year free speech activist, and one of his wise observations from "the battlefield" was always that "people forget that having the right to FREE SPEECH does not grant you the right to not suffer the CONSEQUENCES of speaking your position freely, nor the guarantee that people will AGREE with you."