While I understand why steem gets compared to reddit a lot, when it comes to downvotes there's a pretty big difference. On steem, it's public and anyone can see who downvoted which post, whereas on reddit it's hidden. That has its own problems but it does seem to do a pretty good job at keeping trash posts suppressed and allows "good" content to float to the top.

The reddit approach gets much more complicated when it comes to steem because this is a public blockchain and votes=money. Maybe if downvotes were changed to a type of "shadow" vote that is obscured on the blockchain and doesn't take into account the voting accounts stake in steem, with an option to do a public downvote that does use the accounts stake...

Just thinking "out loud"...