The idea, like many others that involve any sort of regulation, sound appealing. You make a valid point. Garbage content should not be pulling in hundreds of dollars. But how do you draw the line between garbage content and quality content?
The market self-regulates. In other words, ordinary people will have to make those decisions themselves. Stopping them from doing it or encouraging them not to by making a user interface that encourages other voting patterns is just as much "regulation" and can be much more harmful if it stops all forms of downvotes (to any extent).
What we need is to have a separate downvote and yet another separate flag. One for dislikes and one for site abuse reporting.
What you advocate for in essence leads to censorship. Perhaps clear rules on blatant abuse (upvoting self-comments like the one you posted) could help the community as a whole, but I'm doubtful they could be properly implemented and not lead to greater complications. A single downvote from a user with a large share could literally take away the entire payout of a well-written post, which they happened to disagree with.
Less or no rewards is not censorship. Real censorship is impossible due to the blockchain that stores the information. If you want to show more or less of the information, you can switch the app you use to access Steem.
You also make a valid point. See my above reply to personz in this comment thread, as I think it applies to you as well.
This is what is supposed to be self-regulating. I can agree that there might still be good to have some coded limits to this, but they are not all that easy to actually impose because they have to be done through incentives somehow. Not just blocking a feature.
I stand corrected. Maybe you made an error in your writing here. But limits like these can't certainly work to mitigate at least part of the problem, because they can't be avoided by buying votes etc.