about the right of the community to have a measure of their collective view.

I understood that: I really didn't make myself clear by trying to work in a 3 different points at once. Dan did a great job in explaining the problems involved in any reputation system.

The point that I should have focused on was not that reputation should be immutable after earning a certain level, but that due to the ...ahem...capriciousness...of any given community, those with power in the community need to act nobly to maintain the integrity of the reputation system.

I won't use any names, but we had the specific example of a Steemer that was downvoting newbies out of the gate. Someone with the power to do so that in terms of technical ability and voting weight set up a bot to counter that.

Going back to my "evoke" quote, I was looking at it in terms of taking away a vote-earned token, instead of looking at it in terms of adding negative votes. Either way, you end up with negative rep; it's just that taking away a token earned struck me as wrong. Call it semantics.