Downvote? Never used it for people. There are alternatives and other forms of communication for me.

I don't think that this question should be regulated centrally. If Steemit is to reflect decentralization, then not only financially - lack of middlemen - but also in other decisions, such as downvotes or distribution of payouts in proportion. Or whether I should do more curation or not, I would always like to decide for myself. I have made a comment to the topic downvotes and payouts, which I ask you to read in your function as Witness and to give your feedback:

https://steemit.com/steem/@erh.germany/px00h0

It would be interesting to see that if one could become friends with a downvote function as a responsible decision-maker of a decentrally called platform, if it would result in people dealing with it in a sensible way. The only downvote function I think makes sense is the one to dig up the energy from bots. In order to clean up the system and to deprive people who are not present, who have let their bots loose on the system in a harmful way, of the possibility of a passive income in such a way that it is not worthwhile to continue using the bot?

This is not the first time that the problem of how to differentiate between a bot and a human being has arisen, and there are probably good proposals on how to solve this technical problem in an intermediate step?

I have little experience with bad bots. Can you or anyone tell me exactly how they are destroying the ecosystem? So far I have had positive experiences with altruistic bots that look for quality and hopefully learn in the process.

But you'll probably end up with the same problem again, if you stop the bad bots with automatisms to protect the system, you'll stop the good bots as well. ... Difficult. Doing this by hand really isn't the best of all ideas, though.

Thank you.