Hey, @steevc, "deserve" ain't got nothing to do with it. That's my point. If the up and downvotes do not harness the crowd's wisdom, then we're just fooling ourselves when we think we can divine what rewards ought to get removed. In this situation, we have a massive stakeholder/DEV who is targeting a specific community because he disagrees with the content politically.

It doesn't matter how much effort went into a particular post, or how well written, or the fact that it's not a scam, spam, or plagiarism. None of these things seem to matter. And to be quite frank, it puts us in a situation like Facebook and Youtube. You know, the whole cancel/demonetization culture that is driving those folks to HIVE in the first place.

If we do the same thing here at HIVE, then we've lost that special thing that's supposed to make this place a shining jewel to vibrant and lively content creators who have real things to say. We should be capitalizing in the marketplace right now. All we have to do to take advantage of the situation is the exact opposite of what the big social media companies are doing.

By not canceling people for their opinion. Or by not de-earmarking (demonetizing) rewards for what they said. There are a lot of intelligent people those platforms are driving away. Let us not be that guy. Let us not be Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the like by engaging in thought control. Let the ideas flow freely instead of trying to use downvotes as a stick to discourage people.

I watch what you guys do on the chain a lot. Interestingly, one of your go-to arguments is to say: "Join a community and blog there if you don't like getting downvoted and quit trying to take all our precious HIVE." But what if I turned that upside down and said: Why don't you start a downvote community if you guys like downvoting so much?

You can have a downvote token and downvote all the subscribers based on whatever wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey metric by which ya'll are pretending to operate. I think you can gauge the popularity of your actions by seeing if said community thrives and grows. Smooth could be the Simon Cowell, and you could be that gal who had a hit song in the late '80s with the cartoon cats.