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RE: The Politics of Negative Voting
It's been fascinating to see how emotional people get about downvotes on Steemit. I've seen several people have in their head what a "fair" downvote looks like and if the downvote isn't up to their standards of what fair is, they overreact (see the comments to this post as an example).
People aren't nearly as emotional about upvotes, though as you suggest the "right to vote" applies to both upvotes and downvotes. Love this aspect of Steemit and hope to see more ideas like this exercised in the future.
Does Steemit.com's interface represent a downvote or a flag? My understanding based on the steemitabuse-classic chat channel is the flag is for combating negative activities like incorrectly tagged NSFW material, abuse, plagiarism, and identity theft. If the interface represented it as a downvote and if it didn't also (potentially) cause comments to be completely hidden (again, a mechanism for hiding abusive content), then I would agree with you and treat a downvote as just the opposite of an upvote. I understand the backend code and the cli_wallet make no distinction, but we are using the code of this website which does make a distinction and changes the interface according to reputation. If you read through the example in question, it appeared to me the person was trying to hide their misuse of tags by downvoting and hiding the comment of the person who called out their activity. When confronted, they continued to justify their actions instead of owning their mistake. Reputation is important to any community and negatively impacting other's reputation score with no rational justification, to me, is not okay and will not create a healthy community.
And this may be the source of the confusion. There used to be a downvote in the UX and people were okay with it when it looked like it was a downvote. Now it looks like its an anti-abuse flag but people (whales) are using it as a downvote.
So which philosophy should we be following?
Yeah, I do think the old downvote is a big source of the confusion. Most everyone uses the Steemit.com interface, so I see that code as "the law" which matters. The deliberate change in the interface indicates a purposeful change in the meaning of the action. The downvote was prior to the reputation system, prior to all of someone's blog posts being greyed out by default if someone revenge flagged them (which happened today, but was thankfully reversed after some direct dialogue).
I may be overreacting (as claimed above). Maybe the community is fine with others flagging in response to things they don't like, or because they got caught doing something wrong, or because they feel like showing their opinions in a way which decreases someone else's payout and reputation score. I personally think that approach will lead to a downward spiral of negativity. I much prefer an upward, positive approach where everyone lifts everyone else.