Thanks for the upvote support - much appreciated - let's see how many of the downvoting accounts combine to nullify it. lol.

I have only looked through a small percentage of the 150 posts here, but I can see plenty that don't have an obvious reason for being downvoted to oblivion and where no comment was even provided by the downvoter. This feels akin to Facebook 'randomly' blocking posts or suspending accounts - it's really the worst possible situation for a network that is marketing itself as being an alternative to this stuff. It doesn't really matter if the post is still visible on the blockchain because no-one will see it there unless they look (which they won't). It's abundantly clear that certain entities are using witness rewards and other sources to build power with intent to have a high enough reputation to shut down any account whatsoever. I will update the next report to have more useful information that will help to make the more problematic downvotes more visible.

I think your point about there not being enough downvotes is debatable. Everyone has their own perspective of how they view community and how they view healthy interaction. A lot of people don't want to be the person who puts others down in their moment of glory. Some people are worried about retaliation if they downvote a whale. This is totally understandable, since it is clear that some of them seem to get turned on by downvoting others. The risk to benefit ratio of downvoting a whale's post (or one of their friends), means that few people will feel motivated to do it - and so we have, overall, few downvotes being cast.

Ultimately, proof of brain is about subjective valuation of content and the downvotes weren't originally intended to be used to show 'lack of brain' in the post - they were there for policing reward pool abuse really, afaik. Obviously, people can use Hive - within the code's parameters - in their own way, but we don't really have a shared vision or consensus on best practice in the community.

With perception management and information control being such a massive 'market' (which is part of why Web 2.0 companies being massively wealthy), it's understandable that people want to leave Web 2.0 behind. It's not so healthy to have web 3.0 products being run behind the scenes by people manoeuvring to place themselves in the position of information gatekeepers simply through the scale of their stake. Essentially, if we are serious about delivering on the promise of Web 3.0, there has to be very close attention paid to preventing centralisation. DPOS with witness voting as it stands, ironically, facilitates centralisation as much as it facilitates decentralisation. Whether or not the outcome is a good one seems to mostly come down to the actions of those with the most stake (which therefore includes the top 20 witnesses).

It's great to see you are engaging in these matters in a serious way that is pointing in the right direction. It's actually sad to me to see literally no other 'whales' even paying attention. The claim made by some of the downvoters is that actually the whales want this downvoting to happen, I can't say if that is true or not. Your plan to set aside funds for downvoting is great to hear - maybe there's a way you can work with @r0nd0n to make that work more practically, without you needing to be a full time content cop yourself!

The reality, though, is that the downvoters have probably close to $10M between them, so I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make, but it's worth a go.