Downvotes are a built-in feature of the Hive blockchain. They are designed to let stakeholders signal when they believe content does not add value or when rewards are being misallocated. However, receiving downvotes can feel frustrating or discouraging — especially if you don’t understand why they are happening.
This article explains common reasons for downvotes, offers guidance on how to reduce the risk of being downvoted, and suggests healthy ways to respond when downvotes occur.
Why Do Downvotes Occur?
There are many motivations behind downvotes. Some are broadly accepted as useful to the ecosystem, while others may feel unfair.
Commonly targeted posts:
- Spam or low-effort posts — Repetitive, copy-pasted or low-quality content is often targeted.
- Scams or plagiarism — Content that deceives or exploits others is usually flagged.
- Reward disagreements — Some users downvote when they believe payouts are too high for the effort shown.
- Content disputes — Sometimes people simply dislike the message, style, or subject matter.
- Personal or malicious motives — In some cases, downvotes come from personal conflicts.
First Step: Honest Self-Assessment
Before assuming malice, it’s worth checking whether your content could reasonably be seen as problematic:
- Am I posting original work? Avoid plagiarism or reposting material without context.
- Am I adding value? Ensure your content provides insight, creativity, or entertainment.
- Am I flooding feeds? Spamming multiple low-effort posts per day increases downvote risk.
If you see areas where your behavior could be improved, make those changes first. That alone may reduce future downvotes.
If You Believe the Downvotes Are Unwarranted
Sometimes you may be downvoted despite making genuine efforts. In those cases:
- Research the accounts downvoting you.
- Look at their voting patterns — do they regularly target spam/scam?
- Check whether they have explained their voting philosophy in their blog.
- Seek clarification politely.
If you feel comfortable, leave a respectful comment on one of their posts or reach out on Discord.
Example: “Hi, I noticed you’ve downvoted some of my posts. I’d like to understand your perspective so I can improve. Could you share your reasoning?”
- Avoid confrontation — focus on dialogue and understanding.
- Consider wider community feedback.
- Ask trusted peers on Hive for honest input about your posts. Sometimes others can spot issues you may have overlooked.
When Downvotes Are Malicious or Abusive
In rare cases, downvotes come from dysfunctional or hostile behavior. If you are clear that’s happening:
- Avoid retaliation. Fighting usually escalates things.
- Document patterns. Keep track of persistent targeting in case you need to raise awareness.
- Lean on community. Many Hive communities value fairness — discussing the issue openly (without personal attacks) can bring support and perspective.
Large stakeholders have the ability to use their votes strongly. In such cases, the best long-term approach is resilience: focus on creating consistent, high-quality work and building supportive connections with others on Hive.
Healthy Conflict Resolution
Hive thrives when disagreements are handled constructively. Productive steps include:
- Try to see from the other persn's point of view. Many downvoters believe they are protecting the platform.
- Open a respectful dialogue. Treat downvotes as opportunities for feedback.
- Focus on solutions. Even if you disagree, aim for outcomes that strengthen Hive’s ecosystem.
Final Thoughts
Downvotes are part of Hive’s design — sometimes fair, sometimes imperfect. The key to navigating them is:
- Improve where you can.
- Engage respectfully when you seek answers.
- Stay resilient when conflict arises.
Most importantly, remember that Hive’s long-term success depends on collaboration. By approaching downvotes as a chance for learning and dialogue rather than conflict, you contribute to a healthier, stronger community.
For regular updates and reports on downvoting on Hive, plus other useful eco-system info - follow @ureka.stats.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
Read My User Guide for Hive Here
Powerful insights into the Hive blockchain are available at my website, Hive Alive.
Including the only way to track downvotes on Hive - The Untrending report
!BBH
I saw a recent post denouncing downvotes as abuse. I challenged some of the claims made by the author, but it had little effect, and I was eventually downvoted and impolitely told to go away.
My downvotes are generally for comment spam and bot activity. I try to upvotes what I see as quality content or good engagement. I have my habits from my favorites feed, and I know I should do more to find newer authors to support, but I try to focus the vast majority of my voting into support regardless.
It is well known from a lot of scientific research that people are generally triggered far more greatly by losing something than they are excited by gaining something. This is part of why downvots are so contentious and potentially problematic. From a PR perspective their use has been a nightmare.
Ultimately, the votes are sometimes used as a form of Operant conditioning - which then taps in to all of the similar patterns people have experienced in their lives - some of which can be horiffic and evil. So the whole topic requires far more wisdom and understanding than is typically applied by people who view it merely as a weapon to be used in whatever way they like.
The good thing is that there is more content worthy of upvotes on Hive daily, than most of us can meaningfully upvote. I periodically have to narrow my focus, and restrain letting my voting power dip below 65%.
The answer for all us of us is to stake more Hive so we can meaningfully reward more content.
Solid suggestions here, de-escalation is a skill and requires some effort. Some people seem to enjoy fighting more than resolution though.
Yes, when people have been over-ridden in the past, they can believe they are served by trying to overpower others or 'win' and unnecessarily seek catharsis through engineering conflicts. At the same time, it's understandable that people get upset when it is the downvoter who is behaving this way. The more we understand the energy/intent/psychology involved, the more chance there is for balance!
I have tried to de escalate and ignore the downvotes and follow their requirements for 3 years. To no effect.
Once you have been added to themarkymark Buildawhale Blocktrades Zero down list there is absolutely nothing you can do. Just accept this fact and move on. Go backwards to Steemit or move forwards to Blurt.
It appears that much of the Blurt supply has been bridged over to Hive Engine, so that it can be swapped for other tokens.
This is not intended to be derisive of Blurt at all, but it appears that Hivers own at least 25% of Blurts existent token supply.
Is that sustainable?
The Hive Bloggers that hold Blurt on Beeswap / Hive-Engine are Blurt Whales that also post on several of the Hive Alternate front ends …
When you hold Blurt and Bitcoin on BeeSwap you also earn liquid Blurt rewards sent to our Blurt Wallets.
I used to be quite active here. In the many years I have been using Hive, I have only really been downvoted in a big way on one post, one time. It was a large stake holder with which I had a bit of back and forth with about it. We agreed to disagree, but have always been on good terms since.
You don't mention this particular scenario in your post, but it is definitely one that happens. I reposted the same post from years earlier that got something like a 1 cent reward. Then when I became more popular, I reposted it with some updates. The user downvoted it and removed around 80 dollars. I argued that no one saw it the first time. Also I argued that a couple hundred people enjoyed the post, yet one guy with a lot of stake didn't like that it was a repost.
In hindsight I shrug my shoulders and kind of say whatever, but I remember it feeling like Hive would be stuck in a rut forever with this kind of mechanism.
That being said, I don't really have a solution. It is what it is!
Thanks for your comments. Yes, there has been sporadic and imbalanced application of 'personal rules' when it comes to downvoting. This was less of an issue on Steem as the tech was new and there was more of a variety of Whale accounts. Unfortunately, there is not enough understanding of public image management and the potential to gain more through treating people reasonably than can ever be 'gained' by being aggressive.
I think I remember this quite well and one of the main reasons being that who knows what that post at the time got you, even though it wasn't rewards.
It's the same like content creators starting out on youtube or elsewhere, none make anything early on but without the early content they won't get followers/subscribers/etc to get views on the next post/comment or to have convinced curators that this author has been trying and deserves rewards on the next post, etc.
The general consensus is to just not repost, if you had made some slight updates to it then I hope you weren't zero'd (can't recall that fact), but the 7 day window is a fact of the blockchain and people who repost may often get the same voters which goes against stake distribution.
It's not something that happens often, often it may even go unnoticed. I hope that interaction wasn't a reason to keep you from posting more or being active.
downvotes are basically Karens.
No one likes Karen.
It may sound wise to a few devs or whales here but on the ground this newly added downvote tool has literally chased many away, despite all the pre-knowledge about how it would probably chase people, so the overall result is bad, not good, regardless of what the logic and wisdom was. The theory was one thing but the result was a bad outcome so statistically it was a failure and did the opposite of what we are all trying to achieve. We shot ourselves in the foot and will never heal as long as the thorn of downvote remains.
Downvotes have been present since 2016, as I recall - they aren't new.
There has to be some way to address the risk of spam and abuse. So far downvotes are the best anyone has come up with - from my POV. I have had a lot of problems being downvoted in the past, so I am not blindly in favour of them. The key is that they used with respect and against a framework of awareness and understanding.
Nope. Once you have been added to themarkymark Buildawhale Blocktrades Zero down list there is absolutely nothing you can do. Just accept the fact and move on. Go back to Steemit or move forwards to Blurt.
I just scrolled through your profile - going back 2 years - and found the point where you started getting zeroed. There is no obvious cause for the downvotes, except I can see that you had a lot of actifit posts and some like this with no real content: https://ureka.social/@offgridlife/palestine-israel
Did you never even get a comment as to why your account is being zeroed?
Nope.
TheMarkymark just posts Dumb gifs as reply
Buildawhale = Themarkymark
Blocktrades never replies
I deleted some posts since maybe they were controversial where I was trying to explain the Greek translation of the word Palestine. … “ one who wrestles” ….
Which is the exact same English translation of the Hebrew word Israel.
Maybe they didn’t like that post ?
I can't explain the downvotes - I appreciate it can be frustrating and I appreciate your comments as they help the community to better understand the situation.
Yes. Hive has so much potential but it is being destroyed by themarkymark … I don’t understand why he is doing this with his meaningless 7 day downvote to zero campaign
You can see I haven’t given up … I moved 90 % of my Hive to HBD and still post daily
I believe that themarkymark does not like Actifit, inLeo, Splinterlands, and Ecency and tends to target these posts.
There are 50,000 Active Blogs on Hive and 47,000 of them are now on the Buildawhale Blacklist … where everything gets downvoted to Zero on Day 7 to steal rewards from the Curators. It is theft. My Lawyers are keeping track of these actions.
You can see in the data from the downvote report that those two accounts combined have cast under 1000 downvotes in that 7 day period, affecting 160 authors. So they are downvoting quite a lot of accounts, but definitely not to the degree that your maths suggests here.
Yes… 46,800 of those Hive Bloggers on the ZERO Blacklist have stopped posting on Hive and moved back to Steemit or over to Blurt. The Buildawhale Downvotes are destroying hive. All the bloggers are quitting
Steemit had flags (down otes) from day 1. It has always been an essential tool to fight bad actors, and the fact that bad actors also use it does not negate its purpose or utility.
All of the people who used the downvote button for nefarious reasons moved to Hive in 2020. Steemit no longer has this problem with Downvote abuse.
I remember a lot of us spent a lot of our vote power stomping down spam and abuse on Steemit, and bid bots were an epidemic on the old chain. Beneficiaries of such misbehavior were loudest in denouncing flags then.
Yeah .. themarkymark just downvotes people he doesn’t like … very different situation
Very interesting and good to know, thanks.
Thank you, it's important to know this.
every post of mine gets downvoted because i support hivewatchers , people think they can force you to think otherwise , but hey just move one and keep smiling .
Once you have been added to themarkymark Buildawhale Blocktrades Zero down list there is absolutely nothing you can do. Just accept this fact and move on. Go backwards to Steemit or move forwards to Blurt.
large stakeholders have not much interest in downvote without a reason, there is always from their point of view a reason, as you say get an explaination and try to fix things out is the best way to do
Nope. There is nothing you can do to stop the downvotes from Buildawhale themarkymark and Blocktrades
offgridlife was quite a low effort spammer milking autovotes when they were landing on him from larger stakeholders. There's also proof he runs multiple accounts, i can verify this myself based on posh and zing registrations. He likes to continue being here blaming downvotes/marky but hope people forget why he was initially downvoted.
Sorry but You have multiple accounts and milk Hive. I do not milk Hive… I set up Hive blogs for a few friends who asked me to post since they could not figure out the key thing.
yeah go shill blurt to your friends
Yes. This response …. This is exactly why people are leaving Hive.
abusers*
somehow though you're still around for years, weird.
I blog everywhere. I have been blogging with Blogger / Blogspot / Wordpress since 1999. Artists post their work everywhere. Instagram, X, YouTube… this is what Artists do. How is this Abuse ?
ura-soul himself is self-voting his posts with @resonator currently but if i downvoted it it'd cause drama so i'd rather not. which I guess proves my point that most stakeholders would rather not downvote than to be nitpicky about rewards unless it goes to extremes.
Wasn't going to originally downvote this as the post is quite good, but given the history of the author and years of self-voting under the guise of @jamesc's stake and now also trying to justfiy upvoting automated shitposts he profits from I think it's important to keep these self-votes in check, especially done with other people's stake and when they can cause certain posts to get overrewarded like these.
https://peakd.com/hive/@ureka.stats/the-untrending-report-hive-downvote-analysis-2025-09-07-20250907013710
I was curious about this, and at least there is a comment explaining the rationale. I delegate to OCD, and I'm not sure I want to support a curation guild that downvotes good content, even if there is old beef. I cut off all contact with curangel for similar discomfort with downvote use.
That's totally understandable, as I said in and of itself this post was fine, albeit overrewarded for rehashing the same things and most of the engagement just being drama over downvoted abusers pretending they got downvoted for no reason.
I wish urasoul wouldn't keep selfvoting, on top of it all to do so on automatic stat posts that he literally has the untrending website for. It seems the intention is just to farm author rewards. He doesn't even seem to bother curating with the stake delegated to resonator most of the time seeing most votes landing on hbd.funder which points to just wanting to extract as much as possible for as little effort as possible. Something he's been doing for years.
Fair enough. I'm not taking any action immediately. It's late and I'll sleep on it. I think OCDB does good work overall, but I don't like contributing to punitive actions I can't fully weigh myself.
sure, we don't use that account often, last one was probably that one account buying votes
Not to mention a lot of other shady things he does, like using 2m HP proxy to unvote witnesses if they dare using downvotes as disagreement of rewards and voting up those who ignore his abuse.
I don't play those games, I even downvoted my own post today cause it got overrewarded or voted up by his "clique".
#hive #posh
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This is quite helpful...thanks for sharing.
This a vital and eye opening information, thanks for sharing
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