My point being that if downvotes are used appropriately, then they should not be taken personally. It's not unreasonable, for example, to see a post that took 30 seconds to write and yet has hundreds in rewards and downvote it for disagreement with rewards. It's different if a whale is downvoting just because they disagree with you or you get stuck in a downvoting trail that always zeroes your post. I agree it's an imperfect system. Nobody except perhaps for other whales will typically dare to downvote a post of another whale for instance. I'm not sure what the solution is. But I don't think getting rid of the general mechanism is the right thing to do. Upvotes and Downvotes are critical to Hive but both have to be used reasonably.