Yeah, there's parts of the downvoting concept that I can understand and even agree with, it's just orchestrated in such a poor manner. Take into consideration this person of who I won't publicly name:
In the last 30 days, they've made $313 (1,125.49 HP). Their entire curation earnings (as in all time) are a simple 126 HP. Somehow this person never gets any unwanted attention for their endless Hive selling and next to nonexistent curation of other people's posts. Yet every post they make gets that appreciator vote. An average of $20 (daily) per post, and sometimes higher.
Whales shouldn't be downvoting your posts to redistribute the reward pool, they should be downvoting people like that.
There are many cases like this too, and some are worse off. Some people with 70k HP in historical earnings yet they only hold 2k and never stop powering down.
The same reason why I feel that complaining or starting a debate about it will be a waste of my time and energy 😔.
I agree though, it's a big waste of time. Over the years I've grown to just shut up and do my own thing, I can't be bothered with wasting my time arguing with people. But sometimes, situations like these really get me worked up haha, hard to not want to voice those frustrations.
Anyway, I don't think the downvotes you're seeing are whales disagreeing with your posts. I think they're just doing the usual reward pool redistribution work. It happens to a lot of people that get a post that sees high rewards. Sometimes more common for certain people that see higher rewards than others. I understand the purpose, but yeah if the focus shifted towards the right people more it'd be more effective.
Once again, I find myself agreeing because it's obvious.
Sometimes, it feels like they're just picking someone at random, hoping it will solve an issue they've been struggling with for years. Or maybe they're simply trying to mitigate the "situation" by choosing someone who isn’t connected to them… Hmm, that does sound like a conspiracy theory, though. I don’t have any evidence to back it up—just a hunch.
To be honest, I don’t have a solution either. So I can’t really blame them for why things aren’t improving, despite their attempts to "fix" it.
That said, I still come across meaningful interactions like this from time to time, and for me, that matters more than the rewards I receive. That’s why I’m still here. 😁
The reward pool side of things is just them going through the top posts of the day and hitting a few of them, nothing particularly select and not personal. Again they definitely miss some of the people that deserve it more, and aren't looking at historical rewards/held HP to make those decisions.
There's definitely a tiny bit of that too. There are curators of numerous curation guilds on here that have less HP than me, have made 70k historically, but still make $30 a post and are never hit with a downvote. Yet those curators will choose who to curate based on their engagement. "Rules for thee but not for me" kinda treatment. Not necessarily a huge conspiracy, just nobody really paying attention. I know this because I was part of one of those curation guilds for a few years.