I don't want people to live in fear, but you are making a big deal of the one downvote you had from smooth. You have not done badly otherwise. Many talented people are not getting any big votes.
I know some people always do really well because of the connections they have made. I'm grateful for the support I get. If the odd post got downvoted like yours it would not be the end of the world.
Hive is not 'fair', but it can still do good.
It's not an odd vote here and there, it's not about being angry at a downvote on a post of ours, it is about a pattern of daily downvotes, often hitting particular users time and time again, often hitting users on their one lucky trending post who ordinarily make peanuts. It's not about 'fair', it's about what is good and right, it's about a healthy friendly platform, and this behavior creates a toxic environment that is chasing good people away. Defend it all you like, it doesn't make it any more honorable, and the same applies for small payout posts losing half their rewards to smaller downvotes.
It's the nature of the behavior that's the issue here, particularly downvotes not accompanied by comments explaining why the downvote was given to a post, and although it is not the end of the world, it may be the end of a thriving hive blockchain.
Those of us who are regularly downvoted all the time by a variety of users for voicing politically incorrect views understand the scope of this issue, it's happened since before the hive fork, it's never ending, and it is easy to see that certain users and content is targeted far more than others for the content not level of rewards. Maybe you don't see this because you don't make content these whales and curation trails of downvoters out there disapprove of and police rewards on.
It’s not just me tho, it’s the amount of people this is happening to is over the whole platform. It’s clearly a targeted attack, to stop any smaller people attaining anything because the already rich people think we ‘got enough’. again if it was a random spammer doing it fair play, what can you say. But this is a WITNESS who’s working with other witnesses to take away people’s money they fairly earnt because they don’t think we ‘justfiy’ It. Some of the people doing this, cause it’s not just smooth, are the ppl who laughed at newbies in 2017 in steemit chat room 2 and continually threatened to take them down to rep one and demolish them for fun. They voted each other up and didn’t want any new people to get anywhere they spent the whole day laughing at them and sharing their posts between one another and deciding who to target.