Edit: I forgot to mention I am well, although very sore from a lot of hard work lately, and my finger hurts where I ground part of it off using an angle grinder to clean rust off of a pickup truck. I suspect I'll live through these minor irritants, and am greatly enjoying the beautiful weather here lately. I hope you're well also.

Dear Hive account@valued-customer !
I hope you recover quickly from your unfortunate accident!

It is demonstrable that Hive, and it's progenitor, have execrable user retention. A social media platform necessarily benefits from the largest user base possible (while excluding bad actors to the extent possible. What constitutes crime on a social media platform is necessarily different from crime IRL, but the same principles of just society apply). Hive is therefore demonstrably failing to be the best social media platform on the market. While I have discussed ad nauseum the myriad misaligned incentives that have caused users to leave, I note that, by far, the most common thing driving people from Hive is downvotes. The purpose of this post is to consider the several different needs users have that downvotes are intended, or able, to fulfill, and how to separate out from the present mechanism several tools to fulfill each separate purpose.

I guess you got a lot of downvotes on Hive!

I don't know much about Hive's revenue structure and investor relations!
I thought the rich people with a lot of shares in Hive were using the downvotes for their own benefit!

The American system gives freedom and rights to those who pay more taxes.
So, I thought Hive also uses downvotes to benefit the rich who bought a lot of Hive stock!

Hive is in bad shape, because it has poorly aligned incentives with it's purpose as a social media platform, as well as with it's purpose as cryptocurrency, and it's potential to enable voluntarist governance. That terrible performance can be improved by better aligning incentives with that purpose(s), and the consistent degradation of Hive's position in the coin market suggests that Hive is quite literally in existential danger today of some negative event causing it's collapse. Everyone that cares about Hive should carefully consider these issues, and I would appreciate your suggestions and corrections of my lack of understanding.

Do you want downvotes to disappear?