Yeah, machan. I voted earlier when I saw the comment and followed. First time I ever seen her around here. People do need to socialize more otherwise they're invisible. And yeah holy crap, when the auto votes start rolling in, I could never understand why some would get lazy and just take it for granted. Not everyone does though.
As for the downvotes en masse, it is quite shocking to the system. The content creator doesn't necessarily have control of who votes, how, and when. At the same time, when they're well aware the auto votes are coming, that's the wrong time to be slacking off. Yet it's not really the content creator being downvoted, it's the upvotes being downvoted. Still, it's hard not to take it personally. She did recommend offering an explanation, which in theory would put the mind at ease, but in practice often turns into chairs being thrown across the room. Why does this have to be so hard...
And then there's drakos, not doing a damn thing...
This is true and why I keep downvotes manual, no matter how much time they and the explanations and drama involved take out of my day.
There have been tons of discussions with this user about the downvotes before, some just don't want to accept it. It's also funny noticing how steempty's autovotes work, some users get a 100% vote on their first daily post where the second vote is only 10% or so, while on another user "matthew" something they are ~50% on both daily posts - naturally those in the former system only post once per day while the latter posts twice. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that most authors just attempt to maximize them and in a way it wouldn't be wrong but when they barely even spend any time to do other things on Hive then I usually draw a line there and use my downvotes. The main fault is of the very passive autovoter who doesn't bother adjusting them or adding more onto his autovotes to scale the weight down with more users receiving them.
Anyway I'm not someone to go around casting downvotes for fun or to cause drama, in fact I gain close to nothing from it (unless you consider part of the downvoted rewards going to other people I've curated which may increase mine and everyone else's curation rewards slightly) but that is definitely not worth the effort, I could just post something random once per day to maximize my earnings of which I often forfeit the rewards cause of autovoters like this to begin with when I post things I know aren't that important or took a lot of effort/time to generate. It's important to make these downvotes that aren't malicious or zero out posts more normal because authors, especially those who don't provide any other kind of value to Hive and its stakeholders, because when the price starts going up they're just going to be even more aggressive and entitled for their unrealistic $500-1000 daily post rewards while many others are still left with dust rewards.
Yeah I can see how things could spiral out of control once the value spikes. I've seen a few talking about normalizing genuine downvotes. And I don't like seeing folks get zeroed out either unless it's clear abuse or an exploit being countered.
Also it's basic business common sense, giving someone half the value of a car every day just because they walked down the street and snapped a few photos with a phone, that's not sustainable. And the high value seems to attract more active members. If support isn't spread out, everyone shoots themselves in the foot, squanders another opportunity to grow, similar to the bidbot disaster.
Really need to focus on attracting that consumer base I've been talking about for years. The system is designed to function 'properly' when there are millions of actual legit consumers upvoting small amounts, spreading it out organically. You still end up with some people earning more than others, which is only natural in this industry, but millions can do a better job spreading out the pool to thousands of posts than what we have now which is like a few hundred spreading it out to thousands of posts. Plus with far more consumer comments being rewarded, it's spread even further; has more places to go. It would be so awesome to see comment sections here looking like Youtube comment sections, where the consumers upvote comments as well, rewarding one another and talking. But we don't have that here. Everyone shows up to create content. Everyone onboards more people to create content. But without an audience, it's so weird. I don't understand why the consumer role is neglected when it's the most important element.