People take their money real personal.

But here is my issue when talking to you about this. You are very smart. You have deep understanding of the incentive structures on HIVE; this is VERY uncommon.

You know that the person who receives an upvote before a payout has not received anything until the post is paid out. The "money" is still in the reward pool. We do not even know what the exact payout will be until it is paid out. Until a reward is paid out, that money belongs to the reward pool. Unfortunately the reward pool is much more like socialism than capitalism.

I think you are fundamentally correct about downvotes in a lot of ways. But I also think you have had a lot of bad experiences watching downvotes used in the wrong ways and you project a lot of that on me.

But I will give you an example of why my recent downvote was not as bad as you think. So this Karen account keeps posting and getting upvoted. Even after declining rewards. Why? These are auto upvotes from the Steem days. So people who get auto upvotes are able to do things other accounts cannot. In a normal world without auto upvotes, as soon as the Karen account started dumping years ago, she would stop getting upvotes.

We cannot realistically stop auto upvotes. Like it is impossible. So I think we need downvotes. I used to downvote for a lot of reasons but now overtime I just downvote based on KE. There are exceptions but still. KE is very objective. And the person already got paid. They are selling the rewards they earned, even if they were auto upvotes. But if stakeholder(s) do not want someone getting rewards anymore because the person does not invest in the ecosystem, I think that is legitimate. And, if that person was being upvoted by active accounts her getting downvoted forever is way less likely.

There is an issue with HIVE which is people do not really understand what we are dealing with. HIVE cannot function if people only want to maximize returns. On the flip side, if people do not focus on making money and only focus on doing good, HIVE cannot function either.

So the majority of stake needs to operate in a way where we are trying to make profits and we are trying to do good at the same time.

People on HIVE that only do good are not very effective. And people who try to only make money are not very effective.

People who try to do both are well known but not always popular like they should be.