Downvoting is important but there are at least two general limitations. 1) you need Steem power to effectively reduce overvalued rewards and 2) you put yourself out there for retaliation, which in my opinion is the main reason the current proposal will not work ... and why people hesitate to downvote now.

One solution would be for the community (aka a witness or Steemit) to create a downvote bot that people can submit requests for downvoting. The name could be @communitywatch. Importantly, people could submit these requests as encrypted memos so at the end of the day no one knows who flagged them, eliminating the possibility for retaliation. Now, the problem is how will people abuse this system? Good question! I don’t know. The specifics would need to be worked out but the bot could limit the number of of downvotes submitted by a specific user, such as 2 a day. Or it could limit it so one user could only downvote another user so many times a week. Something like that. I don’t know what the right balance would be.

This type of system would also give minnows more power and since they make up the most accounts, watchdogs would be everywhere.

Another question would be how strong a downvote should be cast for a given submission? I don’t know the solution to this. If one post gets many submissions for downvoting, maybe the strength of the downvote exponentially increases.

My initial thought is all requests should be 0.001 Steem or something like that so everyone can freely submit requests. Maybe it should be higher if needed to compensate the person running the account. Maybe Steemit could delegate stake to the account that is just sitting idle. Alternatively the community could delegate Steem power.

This is just a rambling idea I have had for a while. What are your thoughts? I have to imagine individuals would be more likely to go after powerful bad actors if they weren’t afraid their Steem account would get downvoted to dust.