Perhaps even before getting into the realm of punishing bad behavior would be to promote good behavior. With the UI redesign and the addition of the free downvote, there was a bit of a propaganda push to encourage everyone to use their free downvote on "overrewarded" posts.

I hope they had good intentions, and imagine they did this to try and force crowd wisdom to work without understanding why it will not work on HIVE. Crowd wisdom is very cool when it can get tapped into correctly, so I can see why they wanted to tap into that. However, seeing as the sum of downvotes and the upvotes ultimately result in a rather unintelligent sum.

It seems logical to reserve my downvotes for scams, spam, plagiarism, or imagery that's NSFW and not tagged appropriately, but I see overrewarded posts all the time. However, I would prefer to use my stake to reward an article that doesn't seem to have enough rewards instead of needling someone who has "too many."

I realize there were outlying cases where some were self-rewarding to the extreme; however, it seems that the distribution model change, the one that rewards curation more, had discouraged that mostly in favor of promoting good curation habits. And in that regard, it may have helped the reward distribution to get more intelligent.

Do you remember FTG's army of robots and his blessed list? If we had something like that, say 100-odd honeybees and some system that identifies malicious downvoters. A model could get implemented that nulls their downvotes for a specified duration with a swarm of bee upvotes. In a sense, this is almost a punishment because the downvoter gets thwarted by organized upvoting.

Or maybe it's just one queen bee that has enough power to null the downvotes of the handful of sociopaths on the platform. When they find their downvote power has become null, perhaps they will change what they do. Essentially, it's the inversion of how Haejin got treated, but no harm, no foul because it uses upvoting to heal a post and punishes the downvoter by having their expended mana go to waste.

Since this is a subthread and buried a bit, I'll tag @theycallmedan for this last paragraph and dub it the inverted hr-model of behavioral theory. Anthony (or Dan,) if you find flaws with this idea or see a need to critique it, then please do. I'm just spitballing here.