What many, me included, are seeing as something we desperately need on our chain to mitigate abuse and misused bids seems to be something others are completely not interested in using and feel like we don't need it and it just brings "negativity" onto the chain. So I thought I'd make a post asking people's opinions on it and briefly give my thoughts on the matter. 

For the longest time there have been accounts who may or may not have bought stake or come in control of a lot of it and used this chain like a proof of stake chain where the content was just a placeholder and the care of it to be any good or to interact and use the chain as it has been intended went quickly out the window. Sure many attempted to downvote these users but the cost of it became quite big over time and especially compared to others only focusing on curation or selling their votes and growing through that. It was pretty much a lose-lose in many ways. 

In my opinion there are a lot of authors and posts that deserve these downvotes, I see a lot of "guilds" that constantly reward the same users over long periods of time, autovotes that do the same thing, votetrading that does the same thing and all of it lead to low quality content. I see a lot of users saying that they will not use the downvote pool because they don't "believe in it" or that they don't want to face the consequences of retaliation. Is this really what we want Steem to be though? A safe space of vote-trading let's continue growing forever until the next bull run where we dump most of our stake and see to it that our distribution is crap compared to what it could've been if we hadn't just relied on not caring about it ourselves and letting others do it? It seems there are a lot of people here who just keep passing the "work" to others and riding on their efforts while they themselves continuously just keep passively earning and earning + dumping. 

I'm personally looking forward to break up a lot of these cliques and safe spaces as the more I make use of the downvote pool the more rewards everyone else will earn. Of course I will be mostly focusing on the real abusers at first but I have a feeling a lot of that will quickly be removed and we'll be moving up the ladder and make earning Steem through post rewards at least require some effort than a selfie with a sentence. I'm mostly planning on retiring from posting or just post to burn some of their free downvote pool if they feel like retaliating but I have a feeling there will be a lot of accounts retaliating the retaliation too or at least countering it. I am hopeful that we've learned what just remaining passive has brought to our chain and that we'll act a lot more upon what we objectively consider needs to get downvoted a tad to be downvoted and not just pass on the work onto others while attempting to keep our hands clean. It's going to be an interesting experiment and I'm sure it will cause a lot of fuss and a few new enemies all over the board but hey, this is decentralization and the rewards aren't yours until you've received your payout. It's time those wanting to remain authors actually care about their posts, their commenters and other people on the platform than just jerking eachother's upvote buttons off constantly. 

### What are your thoughts on the 25% downvote pool?

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