RE: Now we are selling witness votes?
One of the biggest issues with steemit in my eyes is the downvote. Not that it is there and available, but because it does not work. The only people that can honestly have an effective downvote are those with a lot of SP, and at a reputation rank of sufficient protection. If I wanted to downvote someone for cause, (they downvoted a person's post based on opinion only), then I would need to have more SP and be a higher reputation level than them. Now if they (Steem Inc), added up the SP of all the downvotes a post receives, and for each downvote add an artificial number to increase an imaginary Reputation, then someone with a 25 Reputation may be able to think about - "yeah, that was a shitty reason to downvote" - and add their down vote. Eventually the SP and Reputation would be of sufficient force to even affect an account as large as haejin's.
Until bandwagoning of downvotes is feasible the downvote is useless. Of course then you would have troll armies coming along and downvoting for whatever reason they see fit, just to ruin a persons Reputation. So it is basically a lost cause. People can have no honest real effect on a person with a higher reputation than them.
So Anarchy/Anarcho, socialism, oligarchy, nor democracy are ever going to work on steemit. If people want a decentralized system, then they are going to need to create the rules for it, and enforce them. The FAQ has very few rules governing steemit, most of the rules concern downvoting and plagiarism.
I have had people try to explain the downvote to me because they feel I do not understand how it works, and I will likely get more people telling me again how it works. The truth is this: If 100 people with 100SP and Reputations less than 59 downvote a person Reputation level 70 with 200,000.SP there is going to be no negative effect on that persons 70 REP he may lose two dollars worth of awards. You still even with 100 people and a total down vote weight of 100,000SP they are going to have minimal if any effect.
So you see the system was designed with a very basic flaw, those with the power no matter how they get it, get to keep it, and do whatever they please with that power. There are no checks and balances in a decentralized platform, when it comes to keeping those with power in check.
I think our reputation system has been broken since the beginning. @themarkymark made an excellent point to me the other day, he said. The proof that it makes no sense was the byteball aidrop. There was an account who created hundreds of puppets to get free airdrops, upvoted the puppets with 5 bucks or so and got a ton of free money.
Regarding the downvotes, of course, I agree, they don't work as they should and a separate downvoting VP has been suggested as well. I happen to think its a good idea, but I may not be in the majority.