You make a lot of assumptions as to what a bad comment is. There is already Whales with a network of bots that target people with certain ideas, every time they post, every time they comment. We see a couple of the people affected already commenting within the posts.
Rewarding downvotes isn't a very bright thing to do with the president ready to regulate social media companies, and as facebook and others are meddling in European Elections....and we might see a bit of that here on the steem block chain.

While I haven't been the target of these bots [gulp, yet]. What we aren't seeing is the purging of bad ideas, but the purging of political expression upon ideological lines-classic content based discrimination. If president Trump pushes an online internet bill of rights, I don't think your company is quite prepared to deal with first amendment issues if you think a vote is sufficient. Afterall, the Greeks voted to ostracize Aristades the just for 10 years. And here the decision to ostracize are weighted in a light favorable to those with the biggest money.

To counter these downvotes, some users may have to spend upwards of $1000 (in some cases tens of thousands)...just to break even against these bots...so their posts appears on the main steemit site with images and text...which defeats much of the marketing and incentive behind steem. It is just easier, and in many cases they do, just quit the platform and that hurts the community more.

You guys are struggling to grow in the marketplace as social media giants are purging their users and as they and others are fleeing elsewhere. And instead of welcoming in new users, you continuously harm the community with your laughable ideas at how to make the platform better.

You may simple wish to recognize certain bots that deal with plagiarism/obscenity issues such as cheetah or steemitcleaners can do harmful downvotes for cleaning up the chain, but you may want to completely abolish the downvote option for other users.

Also, how about editing steemit so that the tags we use automatically go into the meta tags so we can benefit from SEO searches. Make it some people browsing the web can find the content we post. Trying to enhance the user experience, trying to grow the number of users, trying to expand user interaction should be the focus-not pissing the existing community off.