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RE: downvoting from anyone that reduces payout because they think the post isn't deserving is wrong
When one has worked very hard on nine posts in a row, without earning rewards worthy of their efforts, they can begin to lose their motivation.
Then when the tenth one they have posted finally receives rewards they are over the moon and their inspiration restored.
Then... A whale comes along and downvotes that post thinking it is undeserving, and the inspiration is gone. Now the person begins to produce inadequate content because they no longer want to make the effort to post their best work knowing that when it finally gets rewarded, it can still be taken away.
This is why we have seen a decline in quality on Steemit, and why the "flagging for disagreement on rewards" is directly responsible.
Absolutely. It has affected me even before I got hit with flags for being overrewarded. It's part of psychology and comparative assessment of work others do, like in a job. If you fellow workers get paid the same for doing less work, this promotes the "unionized" type of socialist communist working towards the lowest common denominator. Quality of work matters to motivate people to get rewarded. Then people want to argue that quality is subjective and blah blah. They don't understand how it works in the real world. Thank you for the great feedback!
Half of that happens because people are rightly concerned with another real world problem: teachers pet.
When only one student participates it disincentives others in the same way, to address that problem of playing favorites a downvote should be much more welcomed purely to object to the payout, it's not that they are right at all, because we know that it's far more rewarding to vote some other post as counter to that teachers pet content than to downvote and subsequently remove value from that post. We cannot stop that from happening in the code, we cannot remove downvoting from the code, we can change it, we can inform people of exactly the consequences of their actions, we can even limit the payout of certain posts and allow others to have a larger portion of the reward pool, but we cannot remove it. I agree that downvoting for those reasons is destructive to the community, but I believe that because it is seen as a flag to begin with, and that because the downvote carries opposite but equal weight (maybe a formula could be used to limit the extent of a downvote) to an upvote it only adds to the destructive aspect.
See this: Why Flagging Is Bringing Down The Value of Steem, As A Currency for why downvoting for rewards and flagging are an issue overall.
See my explanation of the problem and solution: SCD #7 - Working Towards a Decentralized Self-Governance of the Steemit Community
Thank you ever so much for the kind gesture.