Hive account@dantheman, excellent post!
For those who are keeping up with things around the world, we can clearly see this exact thing happening in the news right now:

• Samsung: (trust)
  Due to the their faulty batteries, their perceived (or future) value has taken a big hit.
• Hillary Clinton: (fraud)
  Because she's held public office for so long, people afford her a certain level of trust. A trust we now know she has abused.

I would assume reputation is a huge concern for anyone in any online community. And I completely agree with you, it's hard to gain and easy to lose. Therefore the need to protect it is high. But that doesn't mean we the people should place all responsibility upon the platform to police such things.

One of the things all online communities have to watch out for is affiliate marketers. Of course not all are bad, or pushing scam type stuff. But eventually, someone will try to find a way to game this platform, instead of just being able to appreciate it for what it truly is (Amazing!).

I'll close by saying this:
What Hive account@dantheman, Hive account@ned, and anyone else involved in building this platform has built for us is truly something unbelievable and absolutely groundbreaking! I believe they've done their best by learning from other platforms and mistakes made in the past. Now it's up to us, the community to do our part. We can't expect this to be like reddit, or facebook because it simply is not. In order to have a platform that doesn't enforce governance upon it's people, than we the people need to do our part to enforce acceptable behavior, and punish (down vote) unacceptable behavior.

Note: Just because you disagree with something or someone, doesn't mean they should be down voted. Let's try to remember there is a difference from a post that you don't find value you in, and a post that intentionally aims to take value away from the community as a whole.

Let's take a moment to think about how people vs. government works:

• Government affords specific liberties
• People enjoy said liberties
• People want the gov. to fix problems and enforce policies
• Government tightens grip of control by taking away liberties

The entire point of this (as I understand it), is to have a community "For the people, by the people". If that's truly the case, then that means that the people need to learn how to become responsible, as well as accountable for their actions. We can't ask for new policies to be put in place just because we're having a bad day. It's crucial that we get out of this mindset and learn how to work together to solve our own problems the best we can before ever trying to change the entire system in order to fit our needs as individuals.

-Cheers