RE: STEEM Needs You!
I have always been a believer in quality content being the key to Steemit's success. As a result, I am a huge proponent of changes that would shift rewards from low quality posts to high quality, engaging content that could bring in an outside audience of consumers rather than more producers.
We need content consumers here who are willing to give up profit in exchange for encouraging producers to make content they enjoy. People don't take every spare penny they have and put it in the bank, stocks or crypto. They spend it on movie tickets, sporting events, plays, concerts, video games, Netflix, etc.
We need content so good that people would rather vote for that content (in order to assure it keeps getting made) rather than make a profit voting for themselves. In the process those people would be thrilled to make a tiny bit from their curation rewards. We need to bring back the attitude of "I got paid to watch that video I would have actually paid to see?!!! That's incredible!"
That being said, I fully DISAGREE with the idea that making downvotes easier and cheaper will help in any way. I think it will be disastrous. We have already seen the vast majority of people use their upvotes in a selfish and shortsighted way. What makes anyone believe people will not use downvotes in a selfish and shortsighted way? Do we trust people to use downvotes to help the platform or to help themselves?
Quality content that does not earn rewards because people are using their SP to benefit only themselves is bad for that quality content producer... but they may keep trying. On the other hand, if a quality content producer finally earns some rewards on a post and then it is downvoted for selfish and shortsighted reasons (like to put one's own post above the quality one on trending... or to bury it altogether) that quality content producer is very likely going to say "screw this!" and leave. The selfish downvoter has just been rewarded... "I got rid of the competition."
Since buying votes is much like flagging/downvoting content producers who do not buy votes, we can already see a world where quality content producers are saying "screw this" and leaving. The selfish upvoter in this case is being rewarded because "I got rid of the competition." Since we see this happening now, I'm sure we'll see it happen the other way around with downvotes, which is unfortunate.
Remember when Napster and Metallica made headlines? One side wanted entertainment for free and the artists didn't think it was fair to work for nothing. So here we are, years later. The artist/writer etc can get paid, and the content consumer can leave with more money than they had before they were entertained. If you would have told those who wanted entertainment to be free way back when that they could download their mp3 files AND get paid, they would have laughed at you and said you're crazy... but here we are.