Honestly, I am not a big fan of 'general' communities until we get rid of rewards on layer one. They end up just being a second reward token with little real meaning instead of a community you can call home.
That being said, I do appreciate they give Hive users another thing to login for and participate in.
The lack of downvotes is a big concern of mine with VYB. It is left to one or two people to decide who earns rewards or not making it even more centralized than a typical tribe. The whole premise of this was to prevent "malcious downvotes" which is extremely rare and there is likely one "malicious downvote" for every 10,0000 shitty upvotes, just look at trending at certain times of day or at all the automated reports getting $20-200/day.
Full disclosure, I honestly don't even pay attention to POB or now VYB, I just assume most posts will use both tags as there is no reason not to, so I typically don't even know if a post is POB or VYB unless it is meta like this one. There is no reason to use their front ends as they offer nothing PeakD doesn't do better and the POB penalty for not using the site is actually less than the penalty to use the site.
As a Hive user, neither can ever offer me anything I can't get elsewhere besides "more rewards". For either really change the game they need to onboard from outside Hive better than anyone else. Even very successful projects have yet to do any real amount of onboarding. Both communities could be a great entry point for outside users who haven't used Hive in the past or want a gentle introduction to crypto (something Hive has done for many people).
While I am not a big fan of either specifically, that doesn't mean I am against them in any way. I am happy to see more communities pop up on Hive, let's get 1000 more. A community for everyone is a community for no one. Unless a lot of effort is made to make the community unique and a place people can feel home, it ends up boiling down to just some extra rewards you can get on your posts.
One possible benefit of general communities is that they provide potentially alternative distribution and rewards rules (like VYB's no downvotes). While that particular attribute might not end up being such a great thing, in theory, experimentation should ultimately show what works best. In that regard, the more general communities the better (provided they are doing something different). Eventually, people will migrate towards what works best. In theory. I suspect that there is a limit to how many general communities can provide meaningful rewards so it's not like a 1,000 of them could pop up and really survive (or thrive anyway).
Plus there are only so many tags you can devote to general communities. If you aren't posting to a community related to the topic you are posting and/or tagging your post with a couple of relevant tags, I think it is to you detriment. These days I mostly find new people to follow either because of reblogs or from the list of recent posts I get in communities or tags I post in. If you are making those retrogaming posts but only tagging them vyb or pob then there's a 99% chance I'll never see it and you'll lose out on at least one vote...
You're right about the ratio of downvotes compared to abusive upvotes, but so is the disparity in perception. In deed, it takes very few whales to dominate an entire system, and it's not even necessary to hand out many downvotes to create a chilling effect, never mind that the actual function doesn't allow censorship.
What counts is what people think it is, regardless of what it is. The headlines make the mood in a system. So do the reactions of those who are hit by DV, even if they are a minority. You can't rule out that what you (I, everyone) don't see because it doesn't become public in the first place is still there. "Punish one, educate many" is seen as an effective way to bring the silent majority on a desired course.
The problem of abusive upvotes is unsolvable in my eyes. The system gives it, so it is done. I don't see any way to prevent it, not even with downvotes, although they probably influence those who are hit by them in one way or another. To really create an effect, far more downvotes would have to be distributed than is currently done. I think it's a rather unglamorous and unpopular endeavour and from my point of view people don't want to bother with DW unless they do it out of fanatical conviction, revenge or dominance. In very few cases people seem to be relaxed and take it not as a hot potato but as a cool mathematical correction. But you can't sell that, it's too emotionally charged for that.
I agree that a much higher volume of downvotes would present the situation differently overall. People would not focus so much on ideological downvotes, but accept DVs in general as a kind of indispensable means that can be used to.
In my perception, however, it does not happen that downvotes are dealt with in a relaxed way. And in some cases it is indeed necessary to criticise a whale's motive and expose it if necessary. The few who dare to do so deserve support, I think.