Downvotes are not necessarily about making money. It's very often about preventing someone else from making money, or making "too much" money. Like, how much is too much?
All of this voting is subjective. What would be interesting is to conduct a study on upvotes and downvotes. Why do we do it? Why does Subject A upvote Subject B? Why does Subject C downvote Subject D? In either case, there is an incentive or a disincentive at play. The blockchain has given rise to more than one short-form content frontend because of the debate over whether short-form content can provide value. Most of us would agree that it can, but there are some people who would prefer that Hive remain a long-form content medium. Some of those folks have downvoted short-form content just for being short-form content.
I've got nothing against the downvote button, but there are people who clearly feel the need to use it to somehow correct a perceived injustice for every individual who receives "too many" upvotes or is about to receive an abundance of rewards for an introductory post. Flagging spam and plagiarism are a given, but hitting everything that appears to be low-value content might mean misjudging some of them.
Downvotes are a balance to upvotes, a lot of content here is grossly over-rewarded and a lot is grossly under rewarded in comparison. The system was designed for the community to vote with both upvotes and downvotes to establish what the community feels is a fair amount.
Most people will immediately flip out if there is a downvote regardless the amount or reason.
Prior to me getting involved, there were multiple 100% automated posts making $100+/day. Do you feel that is fair to authors who put hours into writing their own content and make less than $1?
I 100% agree there are bad downvotes, but it is extremely rare and far less common than bad upvotes. I don't feel it is even remotely a epedemic. It's a problem, but extremely rare and 100% fixable with the tools already available to us.
Not all downvotes you feel are bad are actually bad downvotes, in most cases you either don't know why they are happening, or don't want to accept it.
As the largest downvoter on the platform, I don't go around downvoting people because I don't like them or disagree with them. I can't speak for everyone, but the reality is most people here have no significant stake so their downvotes are virtually meaningless.
I feel entitlement is far more of a epedemic here than these rogue downvotes you can't produce.
I don't know if it's "most" people, but a lot of people do, and I think the reason is because they value their own content more than everyone else does. Instead of seeing it as an object lesson, they see it as an injustice. Human nature, I guess.
Life isn't fair. If this happens as a consequence of this:
then the community has spoken, but keep in mind that "the community" consists of whales who can upvote or downvote at 10% percent with a strength greater than a dozen plankton with an upvote or downvote of 100%. To some people, that can seem like an imbalance. I certainly believe that those who have built their reputations on the chain should have more clout. But with greater clout comes greater responsibility.
We found something to agree on.
No one knows why anyone else is downvoting unless they ask, or the downvoter discloses it. When I downvote, which is not often, I do usually leave a comment explaining why. The exception is when something is blatantly spam or plagiarized. I've actually seen people bragging about downvoting something they thought was low-value and I do think there is a huge grey area where "low-value" content can mean a lot of things that are relative to each other. Maybe someone's English isn't that great, so their prose seems choppy and broken. Maybe they aren't great at expressing themselves in written form but have interesting ideas. "Low-value" is a relative term that can mean different things to different people.
Entitlement is a big problem for the human face in general. Especially in the U.S.