Well, I'm glad you included the Wayback Machine link. I came here in September of 2016 when there was only an upvote and a flag button. I see now that it launched with an upvote and a downvote button. That appears to have gone on from 03-24-16 through 07-04-16. Sometime between July 5th and 6th of 2016, the downvote button got removed and turned into a flag. We had about three years of that, then the flag for specific use cases, as opposed to a downvote, that got changed sometime on May the 2nd, 2019.
I also see that @timcliff had some role in "making downvotes great again," but in that post, he highlighted shit-post-spam-comments. Now, I can see the stakeholder argument. And maybe some stakeholders want to be completely amoral and perhaps even cruel by excluding certain content from receiving inflation from the reward pool. But here's the thing, whether it be the shit-post comments Tim drew attention to, or Haejin's Elliot curve charts, or your @hbd.funder comments, which presumably does something? I'm no genius on this stuff.
However, the community managed to organize and change the code to tax content creators 25% in favor of giving these rewards to curators for the so-called "greater good." The change, according to your seemingly amoral viewpoint that stakeholders can do whatever they are empowered to do—that must have been unnecessary in your eyes? It should suffice to say that some of these intellectual quagmires hinged upon token functionality that never existed in the first place, and that's PoB.
PoB was supposed to make it all make sense, and if they could have tapped the crowd wisdom, it would have made sense. There'd be no disagreement because rewards would be fair. But as you and I know, it's impossible to tap into crowd wisdom without breaking the other things. But I don't think this should stop the HIVE Layer 1 community from encouraging a healthy downvote culture or outside-of-the-box solutions.
Here's the thing: Every time you get someone new to HIVE, if you have to rewire the way they see the world for it to work, then it's the product that's broken, not the people. I'm sure when the King got his new clothes, the swindlers who sold the "outfit" said something to the effect that only people of royal blood are capable of appreciating this precious fabric. And there you have it, with some simple word magic, a little gaslighting, and a sprinkle of Asch conformity, they buffaloed the sovereign of the land.
Long story short: I think we need to respect the social dApp roots of the platform--it's what drew content creators in to publish here, and it was their positive word-of-mouth that helped to grow our numbers. If we cannot create a system for wisdom to prevail on layer one, then more and more people will become less willing to spend time here and continue to grow this ever-expanding digital library.
We will lose intelligent and generally positive influencers like Kenny. The inverted negative word-of-mouth will set the tone for would-be stakeholders. And the market will continue to judge us as it has, and it will continue to find us lacking. This hostile working environment will cause the token to remain lower in value than it could be because of the unproductive and generally caustic atmosphere set by a few stakeholders. You are the minority on this one.
RE: After dedicating 5.5 years to Hive/Steem, I've been informed by KING ACIDYO that I added no value