I think the biggest argument against downvotes of a proposal is that it gives more power to large stakeholders to downvote a proposal they don't like, without interfering with other proposals. Right now, if I wanted to defund a proposal that was voted in, my only recourse would be to raise the refund limit (assuming I wasn't already voting on it with my full strength), potentially cutting off proposals I want to get funded. With downvoting, that would not be true.
So it really depends on whether stakeholders want more or less proposals to get funded I guess (I'm not really sure that is how it would work out, but that's my best guess).
Might be more of a threat in the future when cryptocurrency is worth more, and people convert from major coins into Hive, for example. Then, maybe someone comes over with a lot of power and upvotes their own proposal to give themselves 50k HBD a day for a year and just dumps it.
I don't think this is much of a threat, because to do it they would have to such a huge stake and lock it up, and then they have to worry about being forked out by everyone else. If they could achieve a proposal attack on the DHF, they can do the same thing to witness votes, but we saw how that worked out for Justin Sun.
Thanks for your comments here. As you may be aware, I have had the majority of my content on Hive downvoted to zero for several months, mostly by one person with access to millions of HP. This has understandably caused me to post less because I have bills to pay, need to put my time into what is productive and also it is demoralising to go through this (especially with the circumstances surrounding the specifics of the situation too). I could go on and on about this topic from a marketing perspective, what I've learned as a systems engineer and digital marketer about social network design and human psychology - but I'll leave that for now. Anyway, I found your comments here to be interesting for a few reasons:
This is the same reason I have a problem with the current scaling of free downvotes of the content reward pool. I think it's fine to have free downvoting to regulate the rewards pool and mitigate spam, but the current levels motivate people to go beyond that and to target posts for personal or political/ideological reasons (which is currently happening quite a lot). The net result is that many, many people have given up on Hive. I get messages daily since launching The untrending report from all kinds of people telling me their stories. Some of them are telling me that their downvoting started after they stopped voting for certain witnesses too. Generally, they are looking for solutions, getting ready to leave or already have left.
I also commented on Gettr scooping up millions of new users as a result of promotion by Joe Rogan of people who I know personally to some extent and who 'broke' stories that I had already broken on Hive months before. My posts on these topics now get zeroed on Hive. So one of the main topics for marketing Hive's key selling point (censorship resistance), that is responsible for the rapid growth of one of Hive's competitors - is actually getting obliterated from Hive. Ironically this is happening in the name of 'free speech' because some people say that massive downvoting is an example of 'free speech'. Setting aside my own involvement and being as objective as I can, as a marketer and system engineer, I'd say that's a huge error and I strongly urge large stakeholders to consider lowering the amount of free downvotes that accounts have on Hive before it is too late.
In the context of my comments above, this 2nd quote can also be applied to downvotes of the author pool. The amount of downvotes directly effects the amount of authors and posts that get rewards. The more downvotes we have, the more the reward pool is centralised. This is really spinning Hive in a negative light for many people currently. I am fairly confident that some large accounts have set themselves downvote quotas, to try to target those who don't support their witness or for other personal/political goals. This has the effect of maximising their returns, since my data shows that downvoting currently returns between 4% and 8% to the reward pool - presumably boosting all returns from upvoting by those amounts. This means that large HP holders have a significant financial and political motivation to downvote as much as possible - which in turn incentivizes the use of downvotes for information suppression at the same time.
For those who perhaps don't use Hive to spread information to the wider world - and especially the information that contradicts corporate/mainstream narratives, this might not all be obvious, so I am pointing it out as much as I can. There are renowned professors and high profile people who have come to Hive to escape censorship on web 2.0 during COVID, which is great, but they are supported much more on other platforms that are actually technically less capable of Hive of supporting them.. The reason is that the people running the alternative platforms actively encourage them to be there, whereas currently the most active high HP holders on Hive are trying to mostly get rid of them, without even explaining why or ever providing any evidence to backup their actions.
It would be great to have a conversation on this topic - there are many people who want it to happen, including numerous whales who won't speak out publicly and kind of want me to do it since I am anyway.