It could be done away with and Hive will still function and posts will be rewarded.
It would increase spam accounts making garbage content if there was no downvote.
But downvotes were a solution for a problem 5 years ago. Its 5 years later and there are much better ways of dealing with spammers, and there is blacklists, witnesses could just vote that accounts found tk be spamming or plagiarizing cant get rewards for example. Theres a lot of things that could be done differently
Blurt has none so I guess that’s the testing platform for no down votes. It’s new right now but the potential is there to see. So far never seen any abuse or anger there at all.
That could be!
Post quality could be improved but then that’s how steem started it grew over time with content.