I'm glad you digressed from your original topic since the downvote discussion is a super important one. Lately am thinking of solutions that may help to make HIVE more fair. Whatever concept I think of, the red line seems to be the need to increase transparency.
Interestingly, when applying more transparency to downvotes, this may cause (oh well... more like 'likely cause') negative effects to those casting these downvotes. This may be the prime reason why many users don't use the downvote feature. Another important contributor for many HIVE users not to use the downvote button, maybe the little influence they have, the vote value.
Solution?
To increase downvote influence, we should pool downvotes and give (downvote) curator teams the power to use this power. I believe we need more than one Hivewatchers team. I also believe we should be able to delegate our downvotes independently of the delegation of our upvotes. Not sure if splitting delegation for up-/downvotes is possible, but it would be great if we can. When we can, we immediately solved the anonymity 'problem'. Although delegating our downvote power to some other account controlled by a Hivewatchers-like team, can still be traced back to the users providing downvote power, it is highly unlikely those who receive downvotes by one or more Hivewatcher-like teams, will retaliate by going after all those who delegate their downvote power. At least, I think such retaliation on large scale is highly unlikely, especially when many of the HIVE users start to delegate their downvote power to said teams.
Personally, I use Hivewacthers to report abuse. Lately, not so much anymore, simply because I don't have the time anymore now curation takes a lot more time due to the increase of activities in our community. For good reasons, Hivewatchers want to see proof when reporting some post or user. But getting the proof above the table, cost time. It would be great, if we can create something that allows users to report suspious abusive behaviour, without solid proof while Hivewatcher-like teams are taking on the work. The later require a compensation model for such teams. Could this become part of our base chain? Something similar to the ways we compensate witnesses?
We've brought it up many times to create a curation blacklist where we'd co-op with other projects such as @curangel to input users we'd prefer not to curate for many abusive reasons they may have shown in the past. We just really lack the manpower atm.
The lack of manpower, I fully understand. That's why I believe such activities need to be compensated by the platform in one or the other way. When compensation is available, it's much easier to find people to perform tasks that needs to be handled.