Hi, @famigliacurione,

• Removing the downvotes will completely destroy the reward pool, as people will just automate the milking, without having to post anything. Downvotes are here (supposedly) to regulate the distribution of rewards.
• keeping the economic-related-downvotes will cause toxicity and retaliation. Popple will just downvote to allocate a portion of the reward pool, it does not matter to them if what they downvoted is considered as high-quality content or not.

We actually do agree that PoB failed, this is why we have suggested way back to completely scrap it from the native token after passing SMT. Steem then will exist without severe flaws, and the project owners will have the responsibility to configure their PoW as they wish, they will also have the responsibility and freedom to fight abuse as they like.

We are also well aware that this is not a long term solution, but we need to do something to at least fight blatant abuse. Even if this is not ideal, this is nonetheless what the current chain code is dictating. We are proposing a temporary fix that will act as a contingency plan until a better solution or a new system is implemented.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your thoughts, we really appreciate it.