RE: Been doing some thinking.... vol 2

Downvoting over spam, plagiarism, etc, is good. Marky handles that well. God help us when he finally stops doing it.

I'm less convinced about other downvotes. I see "over-rewarded" given as a reason a lot. But that's a very subjective rating.

Over-rewarded because I don't like the subject so it seems like trash to me that shouldn't get as much as it did?
Or over-rewarded because it is making significantly more than other posts in that topic are making?
Or over-rewarded because the author hasn't "made his bones" on Hive, so to speak, and doesn't deserve the same level of vote that many of the whales and orcas on here are allowed to receive?
Or... well, we'll leave it with "and so on"

I've seen pretty much all these situations in my time here. I think one of the reasons people get so offended by downvotes in this "adjusting the rewards" category is because there is no standard. It's all arbitrary and undefined. So they look at how the post that they worked at for hours is downvoted — they feel emotionally hurt but also they look around and see that meanwhile an orca throws up a youtube link and gets $50 in autovotes, and they see hypocrisy and what very much looks like cronyism and feel unfairly attacked. The emotion of feeling hurt combined with seeing what looks like cronyism and they get angry and either leave Hive, start downvoting back in anger, or start ranting about the unfairness of it.

I am not against auto upvotes. (1) we cannot stop it. (2) I think when people have been here a longtime and they get outsized rewards that makes sense as long as they have a "good" blog with engagement.

I think one reason people see things as cronyism is because when people are onboarded they are not explained the platform well.

People MAY get paid to post but they are not guaranteed to get rewards on post.

How people get their HIVE matters. "Good" stakeholders get outsized rewards. "Bad" stakeholders either need a whale friend or they tend to get very small votes.

Even if someone has an "amazing" blog, if they are not a good stakeholder I am less likely to upvote them. If someone gets the benefit of large auto upvotes and they sell the majority of their rewards, this is bad for onboarding new users because it is confusing.

I think a lot of your points are valid and just helps bring to light how nuanced downvotes are. People who have simple explanations of downvotes tend to be ignorant (I do not mean ignorant in a bad way).

I think downvoting for "over rewarded" posts does not make a lot of sense. I don't do it. I think the only time it makes sense to downvote for overrewarded posts is when a post is getting massive rewards because curators are pilling in for max rewards vs reading the post and engaging with the users on their blog.