I was pursuing my masters. Our batch size was 120 students. All the teachers encouraged students to ask questions to engage and learn better. It depends how one takes this advice. Few in the class took it too literally and too seriously. And couple of them made sure they give competition to yahoo answers (didn't say Quora because many questions there are good and helpful)
I am sure you too had that one student in your class who always asked questions which did not make any sense and did not serve any purpose most of the times. I am not against asking questions. But many just want to show that they are superior. They understand better. They are the chosen ones.
After I signed up with Steemit I searched for information to read about the role I need to play on this platform. Most of the posts advice that we need to be a helpful and encouraging community. It said that I have some power to curate content. I need to find good content as a curator.
Nowhere I found the information where it said that I need to be a bird hunter who just shoots the birds I don't like and leave the cute ones alive.
I am finding some "extra responsible" members on Steemit who are acting like bird hunters. There are few who are just downvoting the content without even properly reading the whole content. After all, they are so busy to be the first one to upvote a post which may be a hit. Who would want to read all the 600 words (there are many good people here, that observation is only related to the ones I am talking about in this post) .
I am not against downvoting content if it is vulgar, offensive or something which can pollute this beautiful community.
I am sure that most here live in a democratic country. You can chose to vote for your favorite candidate during elections or not vote at all. Those are the two options you get. Only if the elected ones turn against the people of the state, then there are provisions to bring down the government.
The beauty of democracy is that one person is never the judge. It is the community who decides what is best for them. You cannot be a roadblock and decide not to let people vote. If you don't believe in democracy, great just ignore and let others in the community decide.
By downvoting a decent content without any offensive material, you just hide it from people who may like it or may not like it. You become a judge and that is harmful if steemit wants to succeed. If the content is not what community is looking for, let the community decide. Give them this right to access the content and let them decide as a community whether to love it or conveniently ignore it.
Please don't be like those couple of students from my class who tried to be extra smart. They never made any good friends. They were always ignored.
This is a place where you can spread love. We have the power to be a community which shows that decentralization and distribution of power to everyone can make this world a better place.
DON'T prove those control oriented powerful people "right" that ordinary people cannot handle power.
We are all Spidermans of the future. We are a part of one big experiment which can show the world that people can manage a system themselves. We all have some power, we just need to show some more responsibility
P. S.: This is an original content straight from heart.