Downvotes are totally necessary. As we know, without them there would be nothing to counter abusive spamming and scamming of the reward pool.

There is no denying though that the way the UI is designed there is an emotional impact to those who receive downvotes, particularly large ones. Users see a post of theirs go from several dollars to less than a dollar or even zero and they think someone has taken my money!?

And people know this and some users use downvotes to cause this effect.

It's a tricky one. A very minor thing would be a simple UI change to emphasise the not definite-ness of the payout. You know, like on Hive.blog just now it says Pending payout amount on peakd it says payout will occur in x days even if these were tweaked to emphasise something like Potential payout amount then it would give more reinforcement to the idea that it ispotential and not just pending or happening for definite. When people see pending they think that's what's coming.

It wouldn't fix it but it might help people realise that that number they see is not set in stone and can go up or down.