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It was the second thought I had after hearing about the introduction of a separate pool for downvotes.
The first was: great, now abusers get to be dicks for free.
The second was: if we can delegate HP, why not downvotes as well.
Especially because the risk reward structure of using downvotes for small accounts is terrible.
As a small account you won't survive retaliation and your downvote don't matter. So why not pool it and make it useful.

To be honest, I'm still surprised free downvotes worked as intended.

I missed this: why are you working on replacing SFR?

Absolutely right. The risks are there and those that downvote for even the right reason may suffer consequences, social and otherwise more often than not.

Like to think this problem as a sort of outworking of the type of ideology that supposes police could be replaced by private security. As a matter of fact, I think it gives us a sort of picture of how that sort of thing would pan out which is not particularly well considering human propensities but I'm going off on a bit of a tangent.

Some people may have the big picture thinking and consideration to work to moderate / negatively but I would say it's a minority for some of the reasons you outlined.

As for the last thing, I had lost interest and the chain split really derailed my motivation but there are still a few people that wanted to a hive version of SFR.

It's really something I want to offload and move on from because I don't really care to play "flag and robbers" much as there are more profitable or enjoyable uses of my time like game development.

It might be healthy do create a game for a change. But don't expect people to not be angry at your for no particular reason ;)

What kind of game are you thinking about?

The concept I had in mind is based on a tactical combat technique known as the buddy rush aka bounding overwatch.

Would also like Worms-esque projectile physics for weapons like mortars and think Clickteam Fusions's built in physics engine will help facilitate that.

That sounds like great fun.