I definitely agree with your opinion! A downvoting system is needed to ensure the great amount of value creation. Value creation is negatively affected by posts which themselves create no value. This doesn't mean someone's meme, joke, or even rant. If you don't think that meme's can offer value, then you don't realize the effect they have had on culture over the past 5 years. Downvoting is needed to punish those that seek to gain value without creating it themselves. Those who plagiarise, abuse the value rewarding system, or who's posts are solely of a toxic nature create no value to their community. In fact, these kind of post damage the value creation system on the whole network. If there exists too large a ratio of toxic posts that damage the value creation system, everyone on the network sees their own content devalued. If you want an example of this, then look no further than Gab. Gab technically has a downvoting system, but it is purely aesthetic in nature. At one point downvoting was removed cause a bunch of Alt-Right weenies didn't like their $#!7 being downvoted and kept whining about it to the Gab staff. However, the backlash from everyone else of having downvoting removed made them reimplement it, but as a purely visual system only. This system of non-punishment downvoting means that there is no quality bar that has to be passed, no value creation, for any post on the network. This is why Gab is so utterly toxic, in every sense of the word. Even Minds downvoting system isn't overall that punishing, meaning that the quality content on there tends to be lower than on Steem. It somehow effects how posts show up on trending, but that's about it for Minds, and it shows... It's how, at one point, the top 5 of the top ten trending topics involved the Jews, and not in a good way...

However, there is a flip side to this... A system which places too heavy a belief in downvoting risks causing the same overall damage to value creation that shitposts do. If downvoting is encouraged too frequently, or if it becomes too widespread across the network, then value creation itself is damaged. This is actually worse in some ways, as shitposting is more of a broad spectrum damage that requires a large amount to cause trouble. But downvoting is targeted, direct, and far more damaging on a local level. For most smaller creators, it would take but a couple of downvotes, or even one whale/witness with a bad attitude, to remove all value created by a post, not based on any content in the post. For example, every post I make gets down voted by @camillesteemer (yeah, I'm calling you out you little...) and now by a bot that account owns as well. If the new downvoting system is implemented, I will have to deal with them even more, as they will be emboldened to downvote more than ever.

Downvoting is important to the value creation of a decentralized, blockchain-based network. However, it has to be implemented in a way that doesn't encourage downvoting as an end in itself, but instead as a way to encourage better value creation. If more people, and especially the witnesses and whales, understood this concept better, Steem would be a far better place than it is today.

(Tagging @whatsup so she can read this as I think it might interest her)