Downvoting system needs to be reviewed

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What downvoting is for

Having a downvoting system in place is a good thing, in theory. In practice it can be counterproductive. The idea of downvoting is to mark content that is really bad. For example, content that is just a copy/paste from another internet page, or images and vids without supplying the source.

When downvoting should not be used

Downvoting is not to be used for content you don't like, in that case you just don't upvote after reading.

Downvoting is also not to be used just because you don't like the author of the post.

Theory

The longer you are a member of Steemit.com the more likely it will be that one day you will find someone downvoting your post. It can be done really easy. The downvoter just clicks the flag and that is it. There is no motivation, nothing. You don't know what happened, don't know what made the downvoter perform this action.

There is also a chance you post a comment on someone's post and they don't like it. Their reaction to set you right could be by downvoting one or more of your posts. Nice, but not much you can do about it.

What happened

Inspired by @stk972 I started mixing up animals using GIMP ( #strangeanimalchallenge ). Then I stumbled upon another strange animal in this post. There is no source supplied so I ask the poster "Who created the image?". He didn't know and didn't care. Bummer. I replied he should supply sources for the images he posts, to credit the creator.

All I wanted to find out was if there were more images like that created by the same person. I thought that was the end of it. But I was wrong. Next day the guy invades one of my posts. And not just that, but also starts to downvote multiple posts of mine.

Childish, but alla, if that's what rocks his boat, so be it. I again thought it was the end of it, but was proven wrong again. After 6 days of silence, he starts downvoting my posts again. Well not just posts but comments too, 50+. To give you an idea what that looks like, take a look at his listing on steemd.com.

What is even worse is that he starts verbally attacking people who comment on a new post. And moves over to those people's own posts, leaving comments not worth saving in the blockchain.

Decentralized

The good thing about a decentralized system is that it can not be manipulated.
The bad thing about a decentralized system is that abuse can not be stopped (easily if at all)

Suggested changes

I found an interesting suggestion in a post by @johnsmith. His post is 2 years old, but still valid.

He suggests to only validate a downvote when

• it is accompanied by a comment explaining the downvote
• that comment has been upvoted by someone who is not the downvoter

This will not stop all downvoters, but it will make it harder to randomly downvote.

I'd like to add to that suggestion to remove the flag-button from listings. All you have to do right now is, go to someone's blog page, hit the flag on all the posts visible, without ever opening the posts. Then go to the comments and replies tabs and do the same.

Furthermore you should only be able to downvote once per hour or so. The action is not meant to be randomly performed at high speed.

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