You certainly have stepped into it, haven't you?
For a while there, I would upvote my own posts that had not earned at least a couple bucks. I was such a small fish, I thought "what's the harm?" I found out that the harm would only be to me, so I stopped. Many quality accounts do it, and don't get "caught." I believe if I looked into this, as you have tried to do, I would find that the large self-upvoters regularly support the downvoters, and so their self-upvoting would be overlooked. Not sure, I really don't want to be spending my time looking for this kind of thing.
I understand that the best course of action on Hive is to use your stake to benefit others, and in so doing to grow Hive. But now and then I see a really good, self-voting account holder get harassed into leaving Hive altogether. Who wins in that case?
Perhaps downvoting a post should have a negative effect on the downvoter. The opposite of earning from upvotes, one would lose by downvoting. Perhaps there would be less capricious downvoting going on, and the tool would more carefully be utilized; downvoting often becomes vendettas. Some accounts try to return to posting here years later, and will still be downvoted into earning zero on their posts. I find this to be a very bad look for Hive.
It's complicated, I know. Where you are in the hierarchy changes your perspective and your understanding of what is valuable for the chain in general. The smaller accounts cannot possibly see, or care about, what the larger accounts see and care about. It is a quandary. Much like the rest of the world. Human affairs and all that.
I hope to see you recover from this. I really love your content and long have.
We had that, flags cost upvote mana in the original design, but the one I won't name was soooo abusive that the code was changed to give free flags so that guy could get run off the platform.
I wouldn't oppose bringing that original design back, or adjusting its freeness to one flag a day, the amount of abuse is much less now, afaict.
thanks for the encouraging words! It's clear to me that there is quite a bit of drama when it comes to voting since real money is involved. It's definitely a problem that probably won't ever really be resolved and it's one case in which "classic" web2 social media actually has the better UX.