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I would like to call to attention Dan's proposed hard fork to implement a new voting system.
An  outline can be seen on github: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/279
I'm just helping spread the news of proposed plans to help get the communities thoughts on it.

For those of you lazy and not wanting to click the above link, what bytemaster( @dan) has written in regards to the proposed hard fork can be seen below:

"<h3>First Principles of Steem and Voting</h3>

Every proposed change, payout, should be subject to a virtual YES / NO vote
If one user is able to vote YES, then another user should be able to counter it with a NO
In a perfectly expressive voting system two users with equal stake and perfectly opposite opinions could actively cancel each other's opinion (resulting in a tie). Whenever there is a tie, the decision is left to the remaining voters.

<h3>Avoid a Voting War</h3>

Rather than making everything subject to a YES / NO vote and starting a voting war which could be won by whoever has the most aggressive bot with the "last say", we can automate the process. Automating the process saves the network bandwidth, solves the "last vote wins" issue, and also solves problems caused by people being unable to perfectly counter someone else through limits in the normal voting pattern.

<h3>Countering Upvotes</h3>

It is currently impossible to counter the profits someone earns by upvoting without causing unwanted side effects.

<h3>Witnesses Voting</h3>

In an ideal world there would be no limit to the number of witnesses someone could approve. This is the nature of approval voting. Due to resource constraints each account is limited to approving 30 witnesses. This limit makes it impossible to express an opinion of approving "everyone but X" which would normally be expressed by upvoting everyone but X.

It is currently impossible to counter someone voting for collusive and/or abusive witnesses while remaining neutral toward the remaining witnesses.

<h3>Countering Vote Spam</h3>

Vote spammers flood the network with low value practically meaningless votes. These users are limited by bandwidth but still cause a net negative impact on the platform. There is currently no way to prevent this spam short of censorship.

<h3>Implementation Details</h3>

Every account shall have the power to "oppose" another account with a certain number of VESTS via a new operation:

oppose_account  account opposing_account weight_vests 
The impact of this operation is to temporarily reduce the number of VESTS both accounts can vote with by weight_vests for one week. It can be renewed at any time to extend the period by 7 days from the time of transaction.

An account must have a positive number of votable VESTS in order to oppose another user. This means that a user who abuses negative voting would be unable to renew their negative positions against other users while they have a negative votable VESTS balance.

<h3>Limits on Number of accounts Opposed</h3>

Due to resource constraints and to prevent a single whale from actively negating thousands of normal users, the weight_vests must be greater than the min account creation fee. It must also be greater than 1/256 of the initiators VESTS.

In practice this means that a whale can oppose at most 256 people and that a minnow can only oppose a single minnow. The number of people you can oppose grows linearly from 1 to 256 until your VESTS equal 256 times the account creation fee.

<h3>Rationale for 1 week period</h3>

By having a 1 week period it becomes possible to negate someone's negative vote against someone else. In other words, you can force them to negate you rather than the person they are currently negating.

Without this maximum time, then applying a negative vote against someone else could not be countered or would require an unbounded amount of potentially ambiguous computation to recursively remove negative votes.

It is undesirable for people to be locked in opposition "for ever". People should be given a chance to redeem themselves unless there is active intervention. It would take a dedicated villain to run a bot to automatically start abusing again after expiration or to automatically renew opposition against someone for no reason.

<h3>Additional Side Effects</h3>

With this feature it is possible for whales to "agree not to vote" and let the dolphins (who are greater in number) curate.

<h3>Economic Analysis</h3>

There is a real opportunity cost associated with negative voting. Any whale engaged in such a practice is giving up the curation rewards they could be earning. They would also be giving up their own positive influence. This means that there must be clear economic reasons to engage in negative voting which should minimize its abuse."
(Taken from steemits github as mentioned above)
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<h1>My thoughts?</h1>
Personally I think this will create more problems and would like to know how I can vote against the system that has been proposed on this hard fork. Not only does the proposed system completely change the fundamentals of the Steemit/Steem platform but it also allows for heavy abuse potential from users engaging in otherwise shady behaviour.

<h1>This type of system is NOT the answer</h1>

If this system is implemented what will end up happening is those that do no not have time actively use steemit will have their power harmed. Although I would like to see folks rewarded for constant use of the platform I do not believe that putting penalization in place for account inactivity is the correct method.

The problem at hand is not the lack of a downvote system.. But so much the severity of the flagging. It should be taught that users just ignore content they do not support rather than down flag it and potentially harm others reputation on the site. The complexity in this may be something I lack full understanding of, but I can tell you that an implementation of the hard fork proposed above will entirely change the dynamics of the platform... <b>edit:</b> I see now that the hardfork proposal is showing as closed, glad to see this but we still need to brainstorm as a community so these sort of proposals aren't even bothered with.

<h1>Potential Fixes in Steemit's Future</h1>

Although it is clear the current system needs changed it's also incredibly clear that a system like the one proposed above would likely end up causing more harm than good. A potential idea that I had earlier was instead of implementing a yes/no style voting system that we focus more on educating users proper flagging and also perhaps look into a downvote button that doesn't affect payout nor reputation. Flagging is too severe for some cases... But users still feel a need to express negativity towards some posts. While I understand that users want to be able to voice a their negative concerns against certain posts is that not what comments are for? I think by implementing a downvote button you're inviting blind hate... and when you start affecting people's payouts, livelyhoods and reputations and allowing hateful downvotes.. You're doing it wrong.