I recently read through a post made by @blocktrades. Obviously I did not bother to comment on a post with hundreds of comments on already, because my comment would not be found. I then read through some of the top comments and looked at the people who wrote them.
So let us have a look at the post first. I have been around for a really long time and started a few projects for minnows to help them out, each one of these had their issues. But these small projects became bigger things and gave way to projects that have now been on steemit for a lot longer.
This is where my first thought comes in regarding vote buying, purchase of Steem delegations, self-voting, etc. These systems are not perfect and some are even far from it, but this is a good thing as it will pave the way to a better system. Will we ever have the perfect system for spreading rewards around, well only time will tell.
There has always been a problem with the way rewards are spread over the steemit problem. Community projects try to help solve this problem with teaching members how to post content that gives value to the platform and give rewards to those people who are actively participating in the community. One problem with community projects is that some are designed to self-serve the creator of the project. This takes away the trust of bigger whales in delegating or allowing others to vote for them. It TAKES a REALLY LONG time to curate properly on the platform and whales do not have the time for this.
Auto voting has been a "problem" for debate since the very beginning and helps create a bigger void that separates curators and bloggers. This usually leads to abuse of this system and other issues can creep in. But auto voting is not all bad, I have horrible internet and got to places where I am not able to come online, this system helps me still support those I love and trust with my vote.
Vote buying, in my opinion is the worst idea ever to come onto steemit as the abuse of this system is not limited and can't be controlled as they have payed for their votes. I have viewed this system as one of the best self serving systems that have even been formed on steemit. The buyer pays for the vote and the voter gets both the payment and the curation... hardly fair, but votes seem to have value so it is not completely bad.
This leads to the thoughts about flag buying... not sure how this ever became a great idea to use on steemit, but I have my many thoughts on who is really behind all of this and I am sure the vote buying was also an idea planted by these hand full of individuals. Imagine giving your 5 year old son a shotgun fully loaded and letting him go play with it in a crowd full of people. This is the same for giving a new user to steemit the ability of flagging whoever they want.
Delegation is one of the greatest ideas that has come up so far, but paying for delegation has starved community projects of the support they need to help out the new members that really need it. It has solved many issues though, trusting people with account keys and other things related to the old systems used. Problem with delegating is that the delegater does not get the curation rewards and thus loses out, this is where the buying delegation came in (a better form of vote buying).
Sad part is that all these systems have one thing in common and that is the corrupting influence of people. Greed has become a huge problem in all these systems and projects, thus it has lead to politics on steemit and negativity.
In conclusion there systems are not perfect and require trial and error to get them closer to perfection. People are also to blame for the issues that are on steemit and they hold the biggest contribution to problems within each system.
One thing is for certain, negativity breads more negativity and changing the downvote rules will bring more negativity to the platform. Downvotes are negative and make many people unhappy, not matter where they come from of how big of a weighting they have on the persons rewards.