Appeal to Authority doesn't prove anything. I can read Eckhart Tolle, and I can watch Alan Watts. They are people like you and I. They are not gods. I can choose to agree or not agree with their solutions. They may indeed work, and they may indeed for the most part be great. I haven't seen any human creation without flaw. I don't really like treating the words of anyone like dogma, even if they come from someone I believe is a wise person.

I don't approach this issue from an EGO point of view. I have not had a flagging happen to me. I've seen it happen to others. I've seen it abused, I've seen it lead to retaliation, and seen a dog pile effect and we haven't even had most of the world join us yet.

Right now it'd be theoretically possible for a wealthy person to purchase a lot of steem, power up, and decide they wanted to down vote everything I write, or every steemsmart podcast, or every post by George Donnelly. They could do this without reading it. It is rather idealistic to think this will not happen as it already happens at places like reddit.

In addition, if we are planning on mainstream adoption of steem do you think people are going to give a damn about Eckhart Tolle initially? I seriously doubt it. I do believe we could educate people over the long term.

As to the whitepaper, I've read it several times. Things adapt, things change, and we learn from our trials.

The fact that people feel the need to down vote someone due to disagreement, or because they subjectively believe it has too high of a potential payout is far more of an EGO centric thing than what I am proposing. Up vote only removes the possibility of you deciding you think everything I write is subjectively worth $0.00 and you having the power to enforce that.

If it did not impact reputation and finances and instead was just a NUMBER of down votes then that could feed the egos of people that feel they need to down vote others.