Downvoting is an age old issue on Steem that has played a fundamental part at key moments in the chain's history - particularly during the Big Split.
While Steem is now largely a 'Downvote Free Zone' it is interesting to make comparisons with our estranged non-identical twin Hive.
I believe Downvoting is still an everyday carry there.
My observations from afar are two-fold...
Downvoting on Hive seems to be quite vindictive and overly punishing to the point that it regularly drives people away (and often back to Steem)
While there are obviously many other factors (DAO?) their downvoting activity doesn't seem to have helped the HIVE price as it has continued to sink down to near parity with STEEM over the last couple of years.
With the current state of the investor ecosystem on Steem I am not sure there is a fair way to utilise downvoting here at the moment...
Well, I think this suggestion would actually be fair, because any author can avoid the downvotes by simply not using the tag.
I'm definitely not a fan of downvoting in the way that it used to be used here and - I suspect - is still used on Hive. But, there's a big spectrum to experiment with in between all and nothing.
I'd be curious if the curators in the chat that @personz had posted about ever actually used many downvotes. It may be that the mere threat of downvotes guaranteed that they wouldn't be needed very often. It's a shame that we don't have anyone to ask about that.
(BTW, my American spell-checker thinks that "utilise" is misspelled. 😉)