Hmm... I think the character you are talking about has about 100+ damaged "posts" after the implementation of #newsteem. It's no wonder they're acting like the "village idiot" as you say. If I had his level of investment and people did me like that, I'd probably do the same thing in return out of general principle. Is it possible that the authors did the rate-limited voting in such a way that it respect's an investor's investment by making abuse impossible?

If it doesn't make abuse impossible maybe the numbers just need tweaking a little? Or maybe, # of posts per day + vote value cap needs to get implemented. Anyway, solving this at the level of the code (or trusting the code) without requiring unnatural human behavior seems to make a lot more sense if you ask me. I'm not sure the change is well received among many, I've been following the dpoll results on various authors. It would be nice to see a dpoll result that captured the majority of users. #newsteem may have gotten it partially right with 50/50 and I only say that because it's less disharmonious than the free flags and it relies on people to act based on their immediate self-interest.

If Democracy, as described by Benjamin Franklin, is "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Then how can we illustrate a Steem oligarchy as it pertains to free daily downvotes? Is this to be #newsteem's future, a handful of warring oligarchs encouraging the plebs to.. "Yeah, dip your toe in, the water is warm. What could possibly go wrong? We are all in this together." If everyone is to follow this tack we'd make ourselves an entire platform of "village idiots." I think many of us came to Steem to get creative, not to war for the sake of war.

I think we need a condenser level fix on the STINC interface that allows people to sort posts up or down without influencing the post's value. One equal vote per IP address per post up or down completely detached from the blockchain. Put the downvote button back as a flag to discourage its regular use and then call the upvote button a tip jar. This would at least encourage a standard of behavior on the front end that will cause people to go to trending and fix it every day with a clean conscience knowing that they're not doing any harm.

And you can't say a downvote doesn't do people any harm, because it's a perceived harm that's causing you to downvote in the first place. A perceived harm to the reward pool. It's not a perfect fix, but it's less imperfect than what we have now. Also, if a downvote is not "stealing rewards" then neither is looting the reward pool to the max that the code allows. So if you go with that mentality that you can't steal rshares that haven't yet vested, then surely "the village idiot" as you call him hasn't stolen either because the rshares haven't yet vested, and this means you have no reason to downvote in the first place.

See, all the arguments that people use to diminish the notion that flags (based on reward disputes) are harmful can get turned on their head when you apply the same logic to the other side of the argument.