When I was young, in my dad's car, there was a turbo button. He'd look at me and say, whatever you do, don't press that button! Of course, that baited me right into pressing the button, and the car would go as fast as a Tracy Chapman song from the 80s. Eventually, and this didn't take long, with some trial and error—(that and him swatting my hand away to maintain the illusion), I learned that the button didn't do anything. I went from being empowered to make the car go faster to no empowerment at all.

Thus, I stopped pressing the button—even though I did enjoy the illusion while it lasted, it would be pretty unsane of me to keep pressing on the button knowing full-well that it doesn't work. That's where we find ourselves presently with proof of brain on HIVE. The crowd wisdom means to take many equally-weighted votes averaging these subjective opinions to come to a nearly accurate conclusion. Unfortunately, HIVE cannot do the crowd wisdom thing, but many still pretend that it can.

I think HIVE would be better off in the sense of popularity if they rolled back the downvote button to a flag button and had strict standards for what gets flagged. Then let normal market behavior do what it does. If someone over rewards their post with their stake. Let them. The system has built-in rate-limited voting (whitepaper pp. 15 of 32) to prevent the type of abuse that the whitepaper says we shouldn't even aim to eliminate because it's valuable in the sense that it distributes the currency.