looking forward to break up a lot of these cliques and safe spaces

That's not what "safe space" means.

Aside from that, I fully agree that downvoting should be encouraged. It should be like curation is now. Unfortunately, being someone who barely has time to upload a selfie and a sentence, I don't see myself downvoting much unless I accidentally land on the trending page and see complete garbage.

That said, I do sometimes upload posts that are just that - blog posts. Look at my neat harvest of peppers. And honestly? Seeing high quality original content get less payout than my (very lovely) garden because I have a few orcas on my tail sometimes feels lousy.