About embracing Downvotes | Something that should be Normalized on Hive

Let's talk about the present and a bit about the future.

Downvotes are, and will be a feature we see every day until the end of times on any - or at least most - Frontends built on top of the Hive Blockchain.

Let's get real. Receiving a downvote can make your blood boil. It can make you want to start questioning the downvoter about their reasons. Seeing your pending payout decreased might make you feel as if you are being personally attacked.

Well, stop it with that thinking. I know I've had it. In fact, I probably had those very same thoughts a few minutes ago that I realized I got a $5 downvote (as in, worth of). But instead of giving in to those thoughts, I realized that it is the best chance, at least for me, to start over in Hive and to embrace any upvotes and downvotes I receive. After all, it is what I signed up for.

But see, the thing is, if you post on the Hive Blockchain, you are telling you audience that you welcome their upvotes and, at the same time, whether you like it or not, that you accept their downvotes.

The post payout is not yours until the 7 day payout period is over. In fact, you are not entitled to any post rewards, it is the community who decides if you should get more, less or stay at a specific post payout.

Let's forget about that old thinking of Downvotes are bad and they harm the small users or even better, downvotes hurt the ecosystem and damage the onboarding efforts, hell, I've even heard of a reasoning behind Downvotes are the worst deterrent for user retention.

Well, here's some news. According to me, and several other users who know more than me about economic models, game theory and user interaction, without downvotes inside the community reward pool equation, we would be pretty screwed up as a community.

For as long as Hive partly relies on an inflation based, post rewarding system to ensure that the coin is spread among enough different users, downvotes will be needed.

I'm not going to get into the economics of having an inflation based reward pool, I'm not an expert - I might take a shot at it one day, since I'm using this quarantine to immerse myself in Blockchain code and economic models - so I won't get more into detail about this.

As an alternative, I'll just state the fact that *An inflation based reward pool and thus, downvotes, are not going anywhere in the near future.

It is what it is and instead of arguing against downvotes or making a big deal about it, let's just embrace them and try to get more involved in them; just as we got involved in witness voting matters when we had to, let's do the same and let's get involved in downvoting that what we deemed downvote worthy.

Believe me, there are a lot of posts that deserve a downvote.

In fact, if you think this post is overrated, please downvote it, I promise I won't take it personally. Why should I?

But let's do something. I want to know what do you think about Downvotes on Hive. Share your opinion in the comment section, please, I'm very interested on this matter.