Hi, thanks for the post! I am undecided on the topic, so I appreciate reading a variety of perspectives.

Personally, for some of the same reasons that you allude to, I'm not convinced that having downvotes at all is better than the alternative. There are trade-offs to be sure, but as far as I know, no one has demonstrated that one set of abuses is better than the other, either empirically or experimentally, so it's all assumption and conjecture.

I included a link to your post in my recent article, Science and technology micro-summaries for June 23, 2019, and set a beneficiary setting so that you'll receive 5% of the rewards from that post.