These kind of 'witness interviews' were popular on Steem but I'm not seeing the need for them on Hive. On Hive everyone needs to do their share to contribute as a witness and as a stakeholder as there's no central company to get what needs to be done done. Witnesses contribute what they can and despite what anyone personally thinks of downvotes, upvotes, curation or any other function, they will all decide on what's best for Hive. But to contradict myself, I do get that many witnesses are busy with various deliverables and don't get a chance to communicate witness updates as they used to. That's also the nature of Hive. There's a lot of work.

Downvotes have a use and they belong as part of Hive. I get them a lot. I also give them out for plagiarism, fraud, ID theft, phishing, botnet exploitation and other things in scope for Hivewatchers. The purpose is to return illicitly gained rewards to the pool, from which they can be reassigned to users who care about Hive instead of trying to lie and exploit it. I don't downvote people who randomly message me with their posts, link their posts from chats, or tag me. I also don't downvote for content disagreement reasons or for any reason outside of the HW scope and I upvote only for content quality reasons. I don't use trails although once every few years my account may help test a curation algorithm for a week or two.

The problem with downvotes in my opinion isn't their existence but how they've been used in the past. They're meant to evaluate content but over the years all anyone can think of is either flag wars or messages that people "deserve" rewards (usually used in an argument on behalf of someone likable, even if others have much better content).

We're all Hive reps. You're a rep as much as any witness. Any user who cares for the Hive ecosystem should do their best to represent.

Hive.io is the information site we've got up. We should just call ourselves 'Hive'. Not sure what you mean by " the future development of Hive.io but not the Hive blockchain".