Thought I'd chime in a quick related story of my experience:
Newsflash downvoted an absolutely epic post written by myself recently. It got 427 upvotes and 225 comments. People loved it. It was doing great and then BAM, massive downvote on my undeniably quality content.
Was an interesting occurrence.
Shortly after, in an interesting twist of fate, the community disagreed with him and tipped me 5+ times the amount of the downvote, so even though my 6000-word post says it only earned 2.15 hive according it post-rewards, it actually earned almost 300, despite the random huge downvote.
Anyway, the whole experience felt kind of surreal, and I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I figured it may contribute to the discussion. 🙏
(Side note: Curangel used to regularly curate, upvote, and feature me but stopped suddenly a few months back. Also intriguing. )
CURANGEL IS ONE OF THE LARGEST AND MOST ACTIVE DOWNVOTERS
That... is a surprisingly large number, lol, and I'm not familiar with who it's being proxied to, or why. Still, very interesting stats you're able to dig up, thanks for sharing and commenting. (I actually thought @ura-soul might weigh in here since we had related experiences :D) 🙏
I was informed by Pharesim that Curangel's money 70% belongs to the team that runs it. Azircon is responsible for downvoting, as I understand and has several million $ personally, as far as I know.
It's kind of sad to think that people can acquire such money and not think of anything more exciting to do than downvote posts.
Wow, thanks for sharing this. There's so many perspectives around on downvotes, and it can be tricky for newbies (like me) to make heads or tails of it. I really appreciate kind gestures from people like you keeping me informed. I imagine if someone is that well-off financially, their actions must be done out of... either boredom or passion, lol. 🙏
please consider reviewing your witness votes
each and every account has exactly 30 votes assigned
UNUSED witness votes are de facto votes for the oligarchs
I do my best to stick to my strengths (which is 'explaining things in-depth' through my content) and distance myself from most political stuff, but you're right, I should probably put more thought into my witness votes.
That said, I find the whole witness system convoluted and strange. In governmental politics, I at least have an idea what people 'stand for' or what 'side' I'm voting for, but with Hive Witnesses it's mostly just a bunch of semi-anonymous avatars, and I have no clue what they stand for, all I know is "were they nice to me or not", so that's basically all I have to go on unless I do a deep-dive on every witness. 🙏
well, the top 20 are calcified and generally agree that "opinion downvotes are not really a big deal"
so, regardless of ideology, voting for the bottom 30 witnesses is a vote for DECENTRALIZATION