You definitely bring up some interesting points here! From a personal perspective, I don't use downvotes at all, unless it's for a post or comment that contains blatantly illegal content. This was a habit adopted from a different platform, but it's possible that the usage here may bear different consequences, some of which you mentioned.

I don't think I'll be changing my usage of downvotes, because in all honesty, who am I as a judge of value for content that's generated here? I'm not going to downvote content that seems overrewarded to me, because others may find it to be useful content worthy of their votes. Either that, or the poster in questions has managed to collect followers to such a degree that they've managed to earn consistently high rewards. In such a case, even if I'm not fond of the content, I just say, "That's impressive. Good for them."

Don't get me wrong; I absolutely respect your point of view for how you use your votes, because you have a strong subjective justification and reasoning. It's ultimately up to the individual, but as long as you remain honest in how you vote, then nobody can hold it against you.

In regards to a different point; specifically the quality comment with nearly no rewards or further engagement: I think this is a tragic consequence of the current voting system as it's currently implemented on Hive. Thus, I'm planning to implement a system on the FreeCompliments community that would help reward quality engagement, rather than just posts alone. It's something I haven't seen done consistently on any community I've visited on Hive to date, but it'll also require the community account to have more voting power. I believe it could be a game changer over time, and truly help encourage quality engagement on posts, because this is what drives communities to bond.

Thanks for writing and sharing this post! 😊

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