The loss on income with a down-vote may be more to do with the artificial way up-votes create income. I am not so sure if some deserve $10,000 Steem. Some do, most don't. So we cry over a loss of income we may never have really deserved.

This was an issue, WAS being the operative word. Once you get sufficient steem power (not sure what it is since my votes are worth $0.01 - $0.02) they now have a slider that let's the voter decide how much they want to give the person. So this really is no longer a factor. They accumulated the steem power, and should be able to have their opinion on worth.

I don't believe in entitlements. I do believe in free market. So If I choose to award someone something from my own value then that is my opinion. No one else should be able to cancel out my awards. If you wanted to sell my a sculpture you made and I wanted to give you $500 for it, should someone else be able to come along and knock that down to $50?

As to the african guy. I remember him. That was before the slider existed and yeah we were frequently seeing posts in the $10K, $20K value at the top of the trending every day. The highest I saw was one over $40K. That has already dramatically changed since they implemented that slider. You can tell that by looking at the trending page.

It also freed high steem power people up to be able to vote on whatever they want without fearing awarding someone $1000 every time they voted. This has been a positive effect.

None of that is what I am complaining about. I am complaining about the fund decrease and the PR issues that is likely to cause. This has NEVER happened to me here so I am not complaining for myself. I want to see this platform succeed and if we do not really need a feature that is causing negative feedback on the steem /steemit platform as a whole then in beta stage is the perfect time to try something else.

The positive only thing could be tested and if it didn't work, change it to something else. That is what a beta is for. Yet, negative voting is a problem on reddit and does result in censorship and a lot of people get angry. Here that vote actually takes your potential money away visibly. That I believe will be a force multiplier on that anger. Likewise if the person who downvoted you has a better reputation it could REALLY hurt your reputation, so simply down voting because an article is not to your taste can have some extreme ramifications on steemit.