Abuse can take many forms, but it largely comes down to taking more than you give. e.g.
- Upvoting all your own stuff. I have seen cases of people making junk comments (such as just random numbers) just so they can vote them up. Not so bad if your posts are actually interesting to others and you also vote for others. Often people create multiple accounts to do this.
- Churning out automatically generated posts to harvest automatic votes. One of the reasons I dislike auto-votes is that they can be exploited like this. Can happen with the projects/hives that reward those who use their dapp.
It comes down to judging each case. If I think the rewards are not justified and have not been given by an engaged community then I may consider it worthy of a downvote. I want rewards to go where they are earned and this is why the platform has downvotes (see white paper). I see the Blurt fork does not have downvotes, so we shall see how that turns out.
I can guarantee that Hive would be pretty shit if nobody was downvoting. Luckily the big accounts are generally doing a good job of that. There are some rogue whales and cases where it gets out of proportion. I would hope people could settle those issues and find compromises.
Hive can never be perfect and the freedom is a big plus point, but without vigilantes it will never achieve its potential. I think we should each use our votes to nudge it in the direction we want and not purely in self-interest.
It's a big experiment that I have got a lot out of. I have met so many interesting people, many of them in person. I have not met Marky yet, but I have had good dealings with him so far.