Most of the debate and comments occurred after the downvotes, whereby I even considered removing a couple after the amount of engagement it received. The downvotes occurred due to him using an example of someone who in my opinion fairly deserved the downvotes he got, had he used any other examples I may have not downvoted him with both of the accounts I downvoted with.

Your opinion in general is pretty void about downvotes. We've tried for many years not using downvotes for overrewarded content or people straight up abusing the rewardspool with mumbo jumbo such as technical analysis or now anti-vax conspiracies, downvote mana would cost upvote mana and barely anyone would use it back in the day. In the long run all it did was make everyone farm more, vote on friends, vote where they'd maximize the reward allocation to a select few, create backroom deals where they'd get higher curation off-chain kickbacks. It sucked for decentralization of stake and its wide distribution. I realize it may be hard to see where it would lead being new to Hive and not having been around the days when no one used downvotes and what occurred but that's the truth.

Now with linear curve it is even more important that downvotes affect the way we curate and allocate the rewardspool. It's now again easier to give bigger votes to friends, only a select few or willy nilly like some do such as traf and rancho. I've been someone who's been trying for five years now to distribute stake as wide as possible and as fairly as possible and at the same time can attest that most of the content on Hive compared to most other places is overrewarded, complaining about a few downvotes on the top of the top of overrewarded posts is very narrowminded.

I remember your interview with Dan and when you joined and invited a few students over which I personally curated but your concerns over not inviting your students based on downvotes for overrewarded posts makes close to 0 sense to me. I highly doubt they'd be a target of downvotes as I personally focus on those who receive those rancho votes all too often or on content that's not worth it.

I'm not against coming up with better solutions and downvotes certainly aren't the most optimal solution, using tribes to come up with better ways is great but I'm not seeing much of that. The PoB people seem to instead want to use some centralized ways of muting accounts (from their earnings even which is so baffling to me it makes me not want to look into what else they're doing at all, nor have I once posted in there because of that). Come up with better decentralized ways to handle a balanced pool allocation and you'll have my respect and I'm sure that of most Hive stakeholders as well, so much so that Hive would definitely consider implementing the better solution in another hardfork. Until then this is the best way we have and complaining endlessly about it or each scenario in and of itself isn't going to fix anything nor is any of it reward worthy in my opinion.