"... you appreciate that opinion/ideological/unexplained downvoting causes psychological resistance ..."

I am quoting what I responded to for the "psychological effects" of being downvoted.

"Technically, when you see a big red "you've received a downvote" notification from an app you're using, that might end up in a negative psychological effect, which might cause the person to lose enthusiasm to continue doing whatever they're doing on the platform. Is it because free downvotes exist? I don't think so. Even before free downvotes, even though it could be less than now, people did use the downvote feature."

In the next post, your reply:

"[downvotes returning the reward to the pool] ...and this means that the downvoter will gain a boost on their own posts as a result of the downvoting."

and again, my reply:

"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."

Regarding experimenting with free downvotes, my main point was the "data" -- I am not a statistician, I don't know how free downvotes affected and how their effect would be should the number be reduced. The data is interesting to see and I would love to have a simulation of it. This is again, my quote from my initial reply:

"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 ... However, our solution lies in the future. With a proper, preferably free (or minimal costs) L2."

Your paragraph starts with "In short, while he wasn't originally seeing downvoting as being a problem for free speech on Hive" this to me, looks like I completely changed my opinion on "downvoting being a problem for free speech on Hive." I do like to think that there is a difference between "supporting the reduction of free downvotes" and "looking forward to the data analysis." As I also wrote in my quote, I do not think it'll differ greatly, but with proper data that we can observe. Just like any other addition and removal in terms of features and settings on Hive, it can be put into community discussion for everyone to discuss.

Nevertheless, just as I pointed out in the aforementioned conversations, the end goal is always Layer 2. The solution for a lot of different problematic topics on Hive can easily be resolved with Layer 2 apps in the long run.