I think the autovoting has gone too far, even with the votes I get from it. Some people can post anything and be guaranteed a few dollars. In some cases they do not even get any comments. I do not take votes for granted and try to give my posts some value, even if it's just a fun read.
You are entitled to do as you wish with your vote and I think downvoting is definitely valid as a way to affect the reward distribution. It seems you were not removing all the rewards on the post(s) and that they would still do better than most. Maybe their supporters are upset to lose some curation rewards.
It looks like you have enough support to do well despite the downvotes and you are good enough to give away the rewards.
I do not self-vote in general and will use downvotes where I think they are justified. I have changed my manual voting policy to give less of a vote to posts that have whale votes. That slightly reduces the curation rewards for others, but I vote on comments by the post author to compensate them whilst encouraging them to comment.
On balance I think we have more good people than bad on Hive. Have a !BEER.
Yeah, I'm happy about this, back on Steem I was getting retaliated with like 30m sp for months for downvoting some asshole's 5 question post from trending. If anything it seems people have a bit more common sense here and less of a language/culture barrier. Still they need to realize people downvoting, especially those with cause and without ulterior motives, should be accepted and not retaliated against, else we'll just turn into Steem again.
I have an idea for an initiative to reward feedback and encourage people to interact more at Hive. I actually created an account called @elcomentador, but I haven't started using it because I want to shape this project and find support.
In the meantime, I just sign my comments from this account this way:
This way "El Comentador "
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Wouldn't surprise me considering most of their votes are mainly autovotes at 4-5mins.
Having to get a vote in at five minutes mean there is little chance people are reading the posts. I want more readers and can live with less voters.