Nice! I am hoping for a definitive and authoritative guide to voting, with a downvote that doesn't lower reptuation. As you say,

What our upvotes or flags or downvotes or whatever really come to is a determination as to how much of today's pie your content deserves.

If I can be rewarded for accurately identifying posts that will be popular, I can be rewarded for identifying posts that have been, in many people's opinions, over-valued. It's actually a more valuable service.

When only upvoting exists, there is so much incentive to copy what is currently trending that it will produce arbitrary trends that have to be counter-acted by whales. I am reading some persuasive arguments against the downvote, but none of these has proposed a solution to balanced content curation, that I have seen.

In any case, thank you for drawing my attention to your comment and for making such a thought-provoking case in this article.