He is not a Hive content creator, he's just sharing his posts here through links, not even content. Sorry but we don't live in a fictional world where we can just throw money around at any one we want without others having a say in it because they believe they're not providing any value to the network and mainly chime in when they get downvoted.
Look at his previous posts, he was at least using 3speak - a Hive dapp, to post his content, it wasn't just links. Even then you could say the content was a bit overrewarded because not only was this user constantly trending from the same autovoters he still failed to grow an audience on Hive or what would've been even better, bring his audience over to Hive. I can guarantee you no one would dare to downvote or say anything if that had happened and was true today. Even if some people had personal grudges which some seem to accuse fulltimegeek of, others would've gladly countered his downvotes and defended tlavagabond because he would've had a rich profile with tons of unique users consuming his content here whether or not it was "hive first" which is what I meant in my first setence with "hive content creator".
It's nice when new influencers join, I don't mind people showering them with votes, but if they get complacent over time and their effort of the content they're generating here decreases to only sharing a link and a banner then I really can't defend it nor the autovotes of people saying "oops sorry didn't know he was just linking" or some of you who scream censorship and all this other nonsense instead of facing the issue at hand. That the value they are bringing to Hive is close to 0 and it should reflect in their earnings.
Thank you for your well structured and reasoned reply. I would prefer to be proven wrong in my observations about current trends about downvoting as I feel that HIVE has potential as both a platform and currency. I will continue to observe, engage and create content as I can and see where this goes.