Hello, LBIer's. Over the past few days im seeing alot more people talking about downvoting, getting muted from tribes and added to blacklists. Downvoting is something I personally im not a big fan of because it's just as easy to abuse as upvotes. People dont question big upvotes but they do question downvotes and i think either people dont understand what the purpose of the downvoting button are they feel something is being taken away from them. 
LBI is likely to never downvote posts which is good cause of the drama and stuff but at the same time, it's a little sad because we have the voting power to remove big rewards from shitposters/circle jerkers to go back into the rewards pool. Im sorry but no post containing 8-12 lines of what you did today (nothing) and a picture is worth $50-100.
My take on downvoting is as follows, I might be a little off
Downvoting was introduced so that users could remove pending rewards from content they thought was overvalued. Simple as that.
If you have become used to getting big rewards based on auto votes are vote farming and then someone comes along and wipes out 50% of all your pending rewards with big downvotes, it's easy to understand you would get mad and seek answers. Chances are your content is shit/lazy or copied and whoever downvoted you thinks your pending rewards are too high. What you should do is accept you've had an easy ride long enough and either up your game are accept reduced rewards. What happens is most users hunt down the downvoter, ask why, why, why or throw abuse at them. I've seen people spending hours/days kissing the asses of people they never heard of and begging, literary begging to have downvotes removed.
FUN FACT
Pending content rewards are not yours until 7 days have passed. That's right, they belong to the rewards pool, not you. People should be free to up are downvote as they please. This is why you can have a post that says pending $10 suddenly jump to $14 if the price of HIVE jumps by double digits and the same thing happens on the reverse when the price of HIVE goes down, your pending rewards will go down. We dont piss and bitch and moan because it's not in our control.
Pending rewards belong to the rewards pool until they are issued after 7 days. Upvotes distribute these rewards and downvotes put them back into the rewards pool.
Ideally, if downvoting was used correctly and people accepted it for what it was instead of using it as a weapon, people that post good content would get rewarded more, everyone that produces good content/useful content would get rewarded more based merely on the fact the rewards pool would be bigger.
In the real world
It's abused as much as upvoting and most downvoting is done now as a form of revenge. We've all had those posts where we upset a whale and 3-5 mins after the whale downvotes us, the minions follow with the there -0.00HIVE downvotes. Some of us will have had entire pending rewards wiped out. I've had had to deal with a few of these people for 
Luckily I've not had issues with any project for the past 8-9 months. 
What do you think about downvoting
Do you think it could ever work without the abuse? or to a point where the abuse is a small part of it.
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Lastly, RIP to John McAfee
He was the pioneer of the internet security industry, down for decentralization and a crazy SOB.
