As I have said previously in numerous posts, it is less important what I or you think about downvoting, but more important what the public perception in web 2 land is. Only yesterday I heard Jimmy Dore in conversation with Last American Vagabond (iirc) and they mentioned that demonetisation is censorship. I personally agree with this because in a competition for attention, money is used to increase the odds of winning (which basically means your content is read/viewed by other people) and so payouts are relevant. If it costs money to get views then those with the least money experience the same situation as if they were blatantly and overtly censored. If money is deliberately withheld based on ideology, then that is literally censorship.
Again, although we seem to disagree on this - it is more relevant what other non Hive users think and it seems that generally (at least among the people I listen to on web 2) they see demonetisation as a form of deliberate censorship at times.
For me, the solution is layer 2 communities that can self govern to solve the problems associated with bad actors misusing downvotes. Note: Originally, on Steem, downvotes were a last resort only - yet somehow on Hive some people have ignored this and just used them for ideological reasons to nuke accounts (including mine), without much comeback. Layer 2 technology correctly designed will eliminate this problem and make for the most secure and reliable free speech communities that are possible. :)
Yes, also the better the layer two economy and economic model, the more easily it will be able to use profits to buy layer one
Absolutely, yes, it's almost perfect and I'm excited to see it take shape. I want people to learn more from the world of open source software, where sharing means the easy ability to completely disassociate with the versions that came before and start again if you want to. If people want to benefit from the shared effort of Hive overall, then they need to respect that other people think differently to them and work with them in an productive way - otherwise, face the consequence of the community fragmenting and it's overall momentum being stunted.
The other thing here is that the stakes which have clearly abused their downvote privelages won’t likely be included in some community social token drops. Should these communities build great economies for themselves, it means they will be able to buy up the layer one and nullify what they see as down vote abuse on the layer one too.
Possibly, yes. Short sightedness inevitably results in pain sooner or later!