If I put do a post on burn any rewards will go mainly to the insider circle jerk cabal's posts so I would be helping to fund associates of the very accounts that downvote me.
No.
Curators are paid, and only your author rewards are burned.
Decline gets no rewards, burn takes both curator and author rewards from the pool, that otherwise would have gone mostly to trending, and burns the author's share.
You have been misinformed, do you remember who told you that?
To my amazement, they do actually seem to manually monitor what I post and downvote strategically when they get a chance.
They've succeeded in lessening their workload over the years, but every post gets read, no doubt about it.
I'm pretty sure that decline still gets hit in reputation if flagged.
PS - They always used to take special offense at anti-vax and tranny posts so I've done a quick tranny posts today to test the water
I was looking, you seem to have made quite the fan club.
I started watching my rep more carefully once it was coming down, and it seems that with decline on there is no change in rep - mine has been on 69.74 for the past two years, but previously it could be taken down rapidly by whales with higher reps doing 100% down votes.
Comments could be different but the whales have never really bothered downvoting my comments (except for a few where I give them a bit of a poke)
Thanks for your upvotes on my comments, they may help my rep, but I'm not sure, it hasn't changed yet.
We'll have to watch, I'm not sure.
I guess burn would depend on whether they want to punish the people that upvote you, too.
I figure you got the right to say whatever, as long as you burn the rewards.
You should be able to get rewards, too, but not everybody is as pro-free speech as me.
Some are quite censorious, but the worst one got ran off at the fork to hive.
He would have flagged us both for even having this conversation.
The second and third worst I've ever encountered are both on Hive - but Bernie on Steemit still gets #1 though, he certainly downvoted a few of my posts!