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RE: Understanding Steem's Economic Flaw, Its Effects on the Network, and How to Fix It.
Downvoting doesn't provide incentive for people to do anything. Punishing bad behavior isn't as effective as encouraging good behavior. Bad behavior corrects only after people made the mistakes.
The goal isn't to punish, it is to shift incentives system-wide (not even particularly for the individual being downvoted, though they are obviously included in the system-wide incentive). It is possible with stronger downvotes that you still don't get much downvoting, because people understand they need to avoid content agnostic and otherwise non-value-adding activities (they would attract downvotes and therefore waste vote power, so people don't do them).
Without downvoting there is always too much incentive for people to vote for for themselves or a conspirator based on individual value extraction.
In the case of Steem specifically, there is something else going on here because the pool is by defintion short-term zero sum. When you downvote and shift rewards away from something you don't believe deserves them, you are shifting those rewards toward other earners who (at least by comparison) do deserve them. The encouraging of good behavior occurs there when the rest of the users–the ones not being downvoted–are able to receive rewards.
But if there is only more downvoting how does that increase quality?
Why would a bot or army of bots producing low quality content care if some downvotes happen?
In the case of plagiarism and certain instances you are right. But I've seen accounts get downvoted out of personal vendetta, out of anger for a person who did something the downvoter viewed as immoral (sometimes not even on the Steem platform) etc. So it's not used in the way you say it would be used.
These anecdotes will absolutely happen just as all forms of trolling and abuse will happen. Should we shut down comments because people with unvented hostility or a vendetta will sometimes post "Fuck you, cunt"? I think not. Likewise we can not dismiss or downplay the necessary role that downvotes play in peer-review. There is literally nothing else in the entire system that differentiates between quality and value add on the one hand and self-enrichment on the other. Only downvotes can do that.
Nobody is suggesting only downvoting. There will still obviously be upvoting. It just won't pay to upvote non-value-adding self-enrichment (because it can easily be downvoted). Better to upvote something of actual value and take the curation rewards. The suggestion in the post to change the curation rewards back to 50-50 from 75-25 and therefore eliminate the starting point 3-1 hurdle from self-voting to curation is also excellent and I've been pushing for that since genesis+three months when it was (foolishly) changed in the first place. But that still won't work without getting a handle on the (lack of) downvoting to keep the incentives anchored on the (quality and value add of the) content.