I'll downvote flat out abuse ONLY. If someone wants to post a selfie, and there are others that want to reward them for that, I don't care. If someone wants to post a one sentence post, and there are people(not a bidbot) that for whatever reason like it enough to upvote it, I don't care.
If someone steals someones art/video/music/creation and tries to pass it off as their own, I'll downvote that. If someone just upvotes themselves 10 times a day without providing any content, I'll downvote that.
All that said, here's my prediction.
HF21 will happen and the people that are the most zealous about downvoting will come out of the gates guns blazing. It will have an effect on the largest abusers because that's where a lot of the focus will be. Some of those large abusers will find another path, and some will try to win a war of attrition(ie how long will they downvote me before they just get tired of it.) Then there will be the "Downvote Cowboys"(glad I have a name for this now) This will be all the regular users(active users) who will decide to be the platform police squad. Their ideas of what is good and bad will be wildly variable, and inconsistent and it will cause a bunch of drama that won't solve anything, and nobody will be having any fun, cowboys included. After a time, since it's not fun, or interesting, or financially valuable in any visible way, people will stop doing it, and we'll all just move on turning the page on this chapter in Steem history.
Well for what's it is worth, my opinion of what is good and what is bad is exactly the same as yours. Maybe we can be in the same squad.
I'm down, now we just need a secret handshake :p
I think one of the cool new features that Steem Engine provides will be an oasis from all this. If it gets really bad people might just ignore the Steem rewards and focus on the Scot projects. Pal and Leo already have these changes and there hasn't been a change in typical user behavior(of course it's still early), but what I love, even though it's controversial is the mute feature, which basically means, that content or behavior that 99.999999% of all of us would agree is
unacceptable, can just be shut down before it gains a major foothold like it has at the base layer.
For everything else, live and let live.
We are in the user acquisition phase of our development. People are adding value just by being here, and hopefully having enough fun to invite their friends. If they're greeted by a bunch of wannabe cops telling them what they can and can't do, how to post, what's acceptable, blah, blah, blah, they're just going to leave, and we don't want that.
Again, if it's clear cut abuse,(no content self upvote spam, or plagiarism/theft)by all means, let's downvote that to zero, but downvoting someones honest content, because you don't like it, doesn't add value to the platform, it takes it away.
I've dropped a few warnings and flags in the oasis, almost exclusively for using wrong tags. I don't want to see actifit on steemleo.
On a post I gave a warning, leocurator flagged the post for the same reason. I don't think there as obvious tag abuse on steem/palnet, and spam/plagarisiam/100% selfie maximisers are more the issue.
Agree fully with this being the user acquisition phase, people are adding value by just being here - most of them.