Who are 'the powers that be'? I know HW have scared off some. We do need to deal with abuse, but it needs to be done in a reasonable way. Some people just make mistakes, but will give up if they get a load of downvotes.
I don't think you can take anything for granted here. It is a pretty small community and some of us got lucky in who we got to know. It's harder to get noticed now, but people have to put in the effort.
I wish I could have made it to some of the HiveFests. I really feel like that would have boosted my following. Now I fear it is too late. In my opinion the powers that be are the ones who arbitrarily decide that posts are too high rewarded and they flag them. I'd be cool if they had some kind of criteria published that they follow, but when it is just random, it sucks.
Again, who are 'the powers that be'? I only see one or two accounts removing rewards like that and they may be acting as individuals. Isn't everyone entitled to their own view on what deserves rewards? We don't have to justify it when we upvote a post.
To a degree yes, but I also think when you get to the point where you can remove so much with such a small downvote, you have a certain responsibility to the chain. Similar to how you or I who have been here might point out to new users when we see them self voting their comments etc. There is also the point where other users get caught in the crossfire like users who retaliating against a specific user by downvoting all of their upvotes. Everything we do here has an impact on others around us whether we realize it or not. What we do creates ripples. Do we want them to be good ripples or bad ripples?
As I said, it's individuals and some of them can be anti-social. A bully with a big stake can do a lot of damage, as we saw with 'Bernie'. There are no hard rules on Hive, so people can do whatever they like. I would hope most of the bigger accounts have an interest in growing it.