So unless a account specifically calls out that they are going to upvote all your posts if you Delegate to them, how can you be upset if they don't?
The thing is that they shouldn't, giving someone votes, i.e. curating - shouldn't just be based on how much stake they have and how much of it they've delegated to you which most of the time the project takes a cut out of. This makes it a win-win situation for the delegator and the project and a loss for everyone not involved in their scheme because most of the time when someone delegates to one of these projects they receive a vote back worth 5-10 if not even more x what their 1 out of 10 daily votes is worth, so they are practically self-voting with all their daily votes on top of getting a return on their delegation while the project is just voting it in exchange to keep the delegation and earn a fee on the return which others they may vote for but don't delegate to them won't give them.
This is something that's been abused in many ways in the past, even going so far as to "silently" encourage community-members to set their account as 50% beneficiary on posts to get votes or be without votes and most of the time the content then ends up being bad to terrible, no consumption occurs, authors don't bother to engage and build connections and the platform looks dead and garbage in exchange - same thing goes for vote-traders pretty much.
The idea is that even if you have buddies you trade votes with your content and general activity on the platform still needs to be worth the rewards you are getting. This allows stakeless newbies to come in and distribution of hive and decentralization of stake to form in a way where you're rewarding contributions in different forms and not just because they're giving you an extra piece of the pie or scratching your back in exchange solely.
I realize you're one of the newbies so giving you a few examples.
Let's say I have 100k HP and there's 9 other users with around 100k HP I'm "friends" with. Let's say in total there are 20 users on this platform active and the other 10 have no stake at all and are completely new.
If all we 10 with 100k HP stake do is only vote on each others daily post, we are quite literally just self-voting ourselves 10x per day (10x 100% votes daily mana-recharge rate) which means the new users will get no rewards from the newly generated tokens and the 10 "whales" keep getting all the tokens. In this scenario it doesn't matter if 10 of the new users are curing cancer and reporting it on our platform first, it doesn't matter if they're very active socially, trying to engage with the other 10, using dapps, telling others about hive, bringing traffic from outside to their posts, etc, etc, because these 10 whales are stubborn about making the most returns they can both in from curation rewards and author rewards. They're not interested in potentially getting an 11th whale that powers up hive from an exchange to enjoy their content so much he votes it because they're already "set" with the 10 daily votes from ~1m HP so they don't bother to be more active, engage more, attempt to bring traffic to our chains, keep the quality of the content up, it just becomes a farm to them while disregarding everything else.
While that example is extreme, I can tell you a fairly large percentage of stakeholders do this in one form or another and most if not all on other chains like Steem most definitely do only this.
The cost of stake being used this way, where you disregard everyone else except the 9 friends or 20 friends or 30 friends that vote you back is that genuine newcomers find it hard to get votes - and I'm not saying they should be getting votes instantly and not put in effort to get there - but you can imagine that over time this repetitiveness means that they're outpacing other authors who do share their votes around with many other deserving users who do contribute in different ways and potentially even put more effort into the platform even though they don't have any stake. "We" and by we I mean anyone who doesn't just vote the same few people daily or delegates to a curation project or a token that actually curates (not just votes) or follows and autovoter trail that puts in effort behind their curation for a fee or just to make this place better and the token more distributed is losing out to those few not sharing their votes and being content about just auto/voting the same few people time and time again.
Autovotes are a big part of this too, I receive many from people I never even upvote, some I do upvote myself so it's not like I'm completely no-vote-trading but in my opinion they deserve the votes and continue to put in effort and have earned and continue to receive the attention on their posts no matter if I vote them or if they're on hot/trending list or not. Auto/blind votes have generally become kind of a problem and the only way is to try reach out to those stakeholders and ask them to update their votes by checking if the authors they've placed on their receiver list are still worth it or the thing no one likes doing, using your downvotes to deter them from continuously upvoting which gets you enemies from the authors who are used to the votes and some times the autovoters are so AFK they won't even notice or care about the reduction in curation APR so you change nothing and you now have a few people who'll go around being loud about you being a big mean bully abusing downvotes, stealing people's rewards, etc, etc.
As I said in another comment and I'm sure many have echo'd around the years - while downvotes are nice to have and work well the way they do now, they are still going to need to be fine-tuned in a way where it doesn't cause so much drama and doesn't feel so shitty to receive.
Sorry, long comment, I'll put part of it in my next post so I can farm some more author rewards. ;P
as a newbie.. I appreciate the big picture view you can give me because there is still much I don't know. And what you are saying makes perfect sense!!
It also makes me feel better because about once a day I head to Explore and search by latest posts and scroll through and find people posting what looks like good content with no upvotes yet. I vote and sure my vote is worth like 0.003 per vote but I know how those early votes meant the world to me that I want to pay it forward to others to convince them to keep posting!!
So while I have much to learn and experience I can at least say I am not knowingly an @$$hole when it comes to voting and such :) lol
(also why I had to stop posting everyday because I didn't want to get burned out or get too annoying by posting just to post) Now I just post WHEN I have something I want to post, not because I feel like i HAVE to post something today.
P.S. I'll be sure to vote on your next post too 😉 lol (all 0.004 HIVE of my vote hahahahaha)
Hehe, btw I do look into reblogs of people I follow too, so your vote and reblog may end up being worth more rewards in the end! (just don't spam it daily as there's limited voting power and feed space 😂)