RE: Appreciate it
"We do not require a reason for the up vote, why one for the down vote?" We as a society do not require justification from individuals for positive actions
This is a good point and for general and new downvotes I'd agree that leaving a comment would be good, i.e. if you've never downvoted someone before leaving a reason would be justified and making that a requirement before you can place your downvote is just one implementation away from being added to steemit or steempeak, I can share this with some people who might be able to do something about it if they agree to it if you want. (or make a post and I'll share that)
I do believe that over time and with more users who are not as interested in earning rewards with their stake (there are some of them) there will be projects and stake that combats obvious retaliation and more eyes on content looking for these kind of actions to combat them. As long as something doesn't get zero'd out the user countering an abusive downvote won't lose out too much on curation with their upvote.
I would've loved to hear the reason @appreciator downvoted my post but can't help to feel it was due to old grudges of ocdb trying to put a stop to bid bot vote selling and it affecting their ROI. Or the rest of arguments that followed where he was attempting to put me in a bad light with baseless accusations.
I have shared my thoughts on the down vote and how to fix it several times during discussions on HF20 psot and when the free down votes were being talked about. To me a non-technical person the fix I proposed I thought was a simple one, but when i mentioned it I got the we don't require reasons for up votes arguments, so when the occasion rises I still sometimes mention my fix, but to be honest I really do not see it ever changing on steemit, some of the other front ends may adopt it, but I doubt steemit will ever adopt it, after all they allow people they have given 15 SP to to do nothing other than down vote which adds no value and no incentive for new users to continue to post on steem block chain. I do still hold hope out for the other front ends though, since to me it is a simple fix. You get the drop box telling you what the reasons are to down vote, put a check box next to reason, then allow the click.
When we judge or are judged of a negative action we expect as a society to be told the why of it, we rarely expect to be told the why when our positive actions are judged by someone.
IF someone worked the code for that drop down list to include on Naturalmedicine.io I'd love to adopt it.
This was the image idea I posted about three months ago, (9-18-2019):
in response to a comment stream on anomadsoul's post The Normalization of downvotes | Read this post, then downvote it post.
On steemit when you click the down vote arrow you get a pop-up box that has a few reasons to down vote and a small short explanation of the down vote. It pops up automatically when you click the down vote arrow, you Have to click the submit button. I added the small check box's, so one more small tiny step for a down voter to have to move through. The individual and I just see things differently.