There is a huge **retaliation** culture keeping people from doing just that. People feel attacked by even the smallest downvote.

Have a look at [the responses](https://steemit.com/bots/@mattockfs/please-ignore-my-downvotes) I got when I was testing out a micro-downvote bot setup that aimed to attenuated vote-bot powered self-upvotes.

It's a shame there is no downvote function for upvotes, as I feel that may be perceived as less of a direct attack. That is, I'm not interested in downvoting someone's post, most of the time, but I just want to attenuate a silly upvote on that post. 

Let's say I feel @fyrstikken wrote a shit post just here that added nothing to the value of this platform, I might want to attenuate  @upme's upvote with a bit of a downvote.  If the platform was just stake based, I would be able to do that. Unfortunately, though, it is more stake-based-fear based at this moment.  I have no option to  attenuate an upvote, so my downvote that is too small to hurt @fyrstikken's reputation in any way would likely end up being retaliated against using a downvote thet WILL cut deep into MY reputation.

I think the platform IMHO desperately needs a cure for the fear installed by the power of high stake individuals (most notably bidbot owners) to retaliate downvoters into negative reputation. 

Bidbot proponents like to bring up stake based democracy, but guess what, it is a fear-of-stake based oligarchy instead. Noone dares to structurally attenuate bidbot votes if their view of the steemit ecconomy makes them believe bidbots hurt platform value. 

Now, with one way to downvote, noone can really blame anyone for disproportionate retaliation. But if there was a way to destinguish attenuating downvotes against an upvote from 'could cut into reputation' downvotes, there might be a culture change where it would be considered uncool to destroy reputation in retaliation for a purely attenuative downvote of a disproportionate upvote.