It's not a blockchain thing, because Hive is free and censorship resistant on a technical level.
It's projects and individuals that take on their hands the role to patrol what other users do.
Some of those rules are not posting more than once or twice on 24 hours, only doing original personal content because academic content can be considered by some plagiarism, or just not deserving of votes, even with the sources. And stuff like that that make no sense and not everyone endorse, but those individuals annoy and drive away the users
Now, I see. This is the advantage of diversity. What some people find worthy of support, others may find worthless. Diversity should be a strength rather than a weakness. Unfortunately, some people can't just keep their hands to themselves when they disagree with you. When such people have a high stake in a POS platform like Hive, they bully by downvoting.
There is some advantages for downvotes in some cases, but it doesn't compensate the damage some users can cause. They are not that many tho, so it's possible to never cross paths with them, but still they are annoying.
I also thing that a person has the right to vote whatever they want, they made an investment on Hive for a reason. So even a "bad post" having a nice vote is not a big deal in my books.
There was a time on Hive when a picture of a banana without any accompanying texts got to the trending page and amassed a huge amount of reward. When someone visits Hive, the trending page is the first thing they'll see. Seeing the image of a banana doing that well may pass the wrong information about the platform. Especially when well-crafted original posts hardly have any rewards on them.
Downvoting is essential to prevent abuse. But the downvoting also needs to be policed. The dilemma of a decentralized system.
I think 2 things about that:
The trending should be engagement based and not vote based
And the downvote system should be approved by a committee randomly picked by the blockchain from recently active accounts...
So it wouldn't be on hands of anyone specifically to be able to downvote
These are beautiful ideas but will surely come with their own issues.
Accounts with big stakes tend to have more engagements irrespective of what they post. You know everyone wants the attention of the whales. This means small accounts with fantastic content will have very little chance to make it to the top.
For the downvote committee, I sense there would be politics with selection which will become another problem on its own.
Still, engagement means people are interested while upvotes don't. Everything comes with a downside, we just gotta find the less down one XD
And with the votes, actually no politics would be involved if the accounts were just selected among recently actives ones that have not been selected in a time window...
But yeah, still would have the issue of people maybe not even knowing what is being asked from them.