To be completely honest, I'm not really ready to get back into the drama side of the platform yet. There's so many things at play there. Basic human nature, as in greed, will always be apparent and I can understand people are scared to downvote, because of retaliation. Personally, I'll watch my downvoting habits, because in three weeks, Hive is all the income I have. One or two whale downvotes and my account reputation is finished.
In an ideal Hive world, we'd all vote for good quality content and help out our friends along the way with what we have left. And we'd all band together against abuse of the platform through downvotes. It's just that, whales upvoting and downvoting is what makes the real dents. If I downvote a post voted on by haejin, no one will notice.
I just wish the big Hive holders want whats best for the platform in the long run, which is quality content getting rewarded. It's good for their wallets in the long run aswell, but people aren't great at long-term thinking. That was true a couple of years ago with Steemit and it's still true now. The big people upvote eachother's cat pictures and the rest of us try to write good content and hope for whatever scraps are left. With the horrible behaviour of big bag holders, what kind of example does that set for the rest of us? I would never approve of simple vote trading, regardless of the quality of content, but I kind of just see people following bad examples. The less fortunate will try whatever they can to get their share of the scraps that are left over after the whales have had their vote-sharing fill.
Personally, I'm sticking to voting for people I follow and checking out New for good posts with hardly any rewards and people with lowish rep. Besides that, I'll continue to get frustrated when posts I worked hard on get atleast 10 times less than one simple cat or food picture. It's how it works in the real world and it's how it works here. It's not fair, it doesn't feel right or just, but what can I do aside from trying to set a good example myself.
I couldn't agree more...