There can be infinite interpretations of downvotes, except in regards to their economic affect. Content creators market their content, and upvotes on this platform are the equivalent of sales. In that context, downvotes are clearly taxes, decreasing the net income of creators - and providing the income removed from the creators to the preferred recipients, because ~36 whales extract >90% of rewards, so when downvotes remove rewards from a creator and return them to the rewards pool, it is the whales that get them. Redistributing private wealth is the purpose of taxes IRL too, and just like on Hive taxes rob the poor to pay the rich IRL, which is why Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel are up on stage with their hands out to President Trump.

This is just the financial reality of downvotes, regardless of any other interpretations.

For me, I see that Hive is a platform that enables voluntarist government (were it not for DV's) to provide political services to members. For example, an HOA (home owners association) could decide to use Hive to operate. The rules and operations of the association could be proposed, discussed, voted on, and funded, entirely through the platform. For example someone could propose planting flowers around all the mailboxes in the HOA. All the members could discuss it, and establish budget that could be provided through upvotes. Homeowners that didn't want to do whatever was proposed by the HOA would not have to join, could quit participating at will, and their payment of funds would be entirely voluntary, as there isn't a mechanism to force them to pay money on Hive*. There are ways they could be coerced, and they could be downvoted for their failure to comply the way Hive is coded presently, which is why DV's prevent Hive from being able to support voluntarist government. The platform presents a new political technology to humanity that could enable truly voluntarist, non-geographically based government, for the first time in history, which I find not only amazing but likely to be seriously implemented as the West continues to destroy itself going forward.

But, that's just me, and depends on a lot more things decentralizing, which is beyond the scope of our discussion. However, were it not for DV's, Hive could very well serve to provide a mechanism for voluntarist government to be implemented, which I think conveys a little of the amazing potential of the platform with a bit of error correction. Before Ned sold out there was discussion of what communities could be, and being able to control how votes worked was on the table. Communities ended up simply being interest groups, and not able to adopt different mechanisms for rewards to be handled, which I think is a shame. Were there such ability for communities we'd be able to test and demonstrate IRL different policies, and communities that best enabled curation, rewards, and etc., would grow while those that did worst would shrink and disappear.

The whales had no interest. They preferred their total control of governance.

Edit: *there wasn't until Hive, because the DHF is a common pool of funds in which Hive users have equity proportional to their stake. Because the DHF can be spent by majority stakeholders, the minority of stake on Hive can be forced to spend the DHF. I have discussed with some whales the reduction of our proposal VP when we vote for successful proposals, but so far they have all feigned incomprehension of the idea, despite our VP is reduced by curation already so it's not some novel concept.