The steem whitepaper never mentioned downvotes or flags as these things are somewhat foreign to social media in that they can affect someone financially. Steem spoke to negative voting like so: "In fact, honest large stakeholders are likely to be more effective by policing abuse and using negative voting than they would be by voting for smaller contributions. The use of negative voting to keep people from abusing the system leverages the crab mentality that many people have when it gets perceived that one individual is profiting at the expense of everyone else. While crab mentality normally refers to short-sighted people keeping good people down, it's also what allows good people to keep bad people down. The only "problem" with crab mentality is when people wrongly believe someone is profiting at everyone else's expense." (pp. 14 of 32)

So when people like Haejin stop doing the Haejin thing, does he automatically have to get replaced by "a new bad guy?" E.G., I think dwinblood is a fantastic author. I certainly don't think he's trying to profit off of the expense of others. He does write exceptionally better than many others on this platform, but I doubt that he is a successful author with the sole aim as to deprive others of something. I think some posts may get voted highly by many people because they are extraordinary and merit the upvotes they've received. I don't know how you do it—If I had to compare your post and dwinblood's posts. I'd have to admit they are both apples and oranges, but I wouldn't feel qualified to eliminate potential rewards from either one of them.

As far as Reddit goes, opinion downvotes that don't affect potential rewards are one thing, and those that do are another thing entirely. So I would say that point seems like a false equivalency to me. However, the same applies to Blurt. Blurt didn't luck out when they split off and end up on the semi-equal ground. And this is because they didn't have a big bad wolf-like Justin Sun and the entire exchange conspiracy working against them. Because of Justin and the shenanigans that he pulled off, we got pity listings on certain exchanges as well-we-should-have considering their involvement and desire to be seen as a politically correct actor in the cryptosphere.

That said, I think Blurt's failure to catch on has more to do with a low publicity chain split than anything to do with their downvote policy. Anyways, I don't think I'm having much influence on you, but I do appreciate you letting me query you some. I do see that HIVE's white paper mentions downvotes twice without any mention of crowd wisdom. So I'm glad that hopefully, they've abandoned the magical myth that was proof of brain as they wrongly defined it. However, I'm still hoping that one day they'll aspire towards a form of social coaxing that's less antisocial and more conducive for onboarding. It's somewhat ridiculous that we have to reprogram people upstairs to adapt to our wonky system when we could just be encouraging good behavior from the get-go. Have a good one, Acid. And again, sorry if I had inadvertently mischaracterized you.