RE: Why free downvotes are a good and necessary part of STEEM
You're beginning to sound like a cheerleader. "The best interest of the platform" is good content towards the top of the trending list. I like to think I provided that until some people saw fit to interfere with me. Even my shorter, newer, non-video posts aren't junk.
created to crowdsource the best content
It doesn't work and it never will, as I explained earlier. People will always band together and scratch each others' backs regardless of skin quality. Trying to force what can't be will only serve to drive some of the best content creators away. Ask yourself why no star Youtubers are flocking to the Steem. There is your answer.
negative voting is a part of it to explicitly be used against colluding groups
Agreed. But it is being used only against the little folk. The big fish are happily colluding like they always have. So that mechanism doesn't work either; it only creates unfairness and negativity. So why cheer for it?
Youtubers don't come because of the back scratching and the need to buy visibility, downvotes have nothing to do with it.
I came to steem because I liked the ideas described in the whitepaper, and I will do whatever I can to make them work. It's possible that it can't be, then we're all wasting our time. I'm not ready to give up yet though.
Slowwalker is far from a little fish, but our power is limited. One after the other, the system was broken a long time and people got used to it, it will take a long time to revert (if possible).
Downvotes are not used against colluding small fish, they go against the defective voters aka bots - it just happens that a lot of small users are their customers, but the size of the guy buying doesn't change anything, the downvotes hit all buyers.
You feel entitled to move your own content up to trending, but that's not how it should work. Everyone thinks their shit is the greatest. If you can't accept that and only can point to others doing wrong too instead of helping to do something against it, it's maybe really best to leave, because your entitlement won't stop us in our efforts to steer the ship around and you seem only to be dedicated to reinforce what's been going wrong all the time.