I've been a supporter of #hive-watchers. Down votes can be abused in the same was as any other features of a forum.

IMHO, when people down vote, they need to state the reason.

The down-voter should remove the down vote if the stated reason proves true.

Right now, one gets put on a down vote list without knowing why.

In my case, I received a down vote on a post about creating hive-engine token. My assumption is that it was an objection to my buying a hive-engine project. It is blockchain suicide to downvote people for buying stuff with our crypto.

Many tokens were abusive. Many token creators proved to be spammers or scammers.

The down voter later claimed that I was copying and pasting content from my blurt.blog account. I've dropped 54 posts on blurt ... about 1 a month. I can't find any instance of copying and pasting text. I have reused images on different sites. This is when the image was not a primary part of the post.

Communication is the key to making down votes work.

I am not opposed to downvoting people for copying and pasting from different platforms. I never did that. I just kept my blurt account active. (everyone who was on chain before the steemit/hive split received a blurt account).

Down voting without communication is the problem. I've down voted people. I've always said why before the down vote.

!WINE