around 4-8% of the rewards pool is returned to authors through downvoting overall - which therefore then gets paid to everyone making posts.. and this means that the downvoter will gain a boost on their own posts as a result of the downvoting.

From my observation, a lot of people who downvote quite regularly are "curators", in other words, they focus on curation and/or other aspects of Hive as opposed to writing posts themselves. So I don't think they downvote specifically to increase their gains.

The aim in reducing the level of free downvotes is not to stop all downvoting, but to force downvoters to be more judicious and careful in their downvoting.

I see your point and would definitely be interested in seeing how it would play out if free downvotes did still exist, albeit at a lower rate.

Tests and data (potentially simulation) on how things would turn out if free downvotes were reduced to 1/day would definitely be useful. I don't know and can't really estimate if it will cause any substantial changes (both positive and negative) but it's nice to see nevertheless.

In conclusion, I believe we can both agree that there are a lot of data that needs to be analysed and hopefully tested (could be simulated) to find the best sweet spot for our situation now. However, our solution lies in the future. With a proper, preferably free (or minimal costs) L2.