For what its worth, I haven't gotten into "downvote wars" often, I could probably count most of them quite quick here and give you a description as to what the reasons were.
Some account called boosta who'd selfvote a ton on short meme content on main account and alts, this may have been way before downvote mana even existed. He was quite a big account, 400k+ SP back in the day I believe and went on to retaliate the initial downvotes for months on end.
Some accounts from Korean stakeholders, one initial downvote on a post simply asking a question at $60+ back then caused for months of retaliation of a trail of 20-40m SP.
A couple east European users who'd shitpost "poetry" and maximize the way they'd earn rewards by vote trading, selfvoting and the likes, think they were called something like dobartim and flysky, they remained on Steem I believe as they voted for Justin Sun witnesses before the fork.
One account who's still active today trying to milk the pool called kingscrown.
A lot of accounts still trying to sell votes even after the change in curation and introduction of downvote mana to bring curation back, some resistance there early on but eventually most opted for curation, though I'm sure a lot of resentment and grudges remained due to APR's decreasing.
The Project Hope community for orchestrating a long lasting kickback scheme where they'd ask their community to give them 50% of the author rewards in order to receive votes, caused a lot of comments and drama back and forth but eventually they stopped leasing HP since it wasn't profitable anymore and settled for Steem.
I'm sure a lot of individual users as well but most of the time many were short lasting.
These things are recorded on the blockchain, it's not meant to be a "triumph" or to boast about my recklessness or stubbornness or braveness or anything, I just did what I thought was right and what I believed the majority agreed to, whether or not they were open and public about it was another thing.
Downvotes are no ones friend but without them we can't make this place work, that's clear.
If you're pushed to have to downvote someone there's most of the time nothing to gain from it and a lot to lose. Time spent debating, arguing and trying to reason. Time spent researching and trying to understand how certain schemes are set up to cheat the rewardpool in favor of a few actors at the cost of all the others. Time spent making up for retaliation attempts on yourself, others involved with your projects or just others who dared to speak up - which is why many choose to remain silent instead, albeit not the only reason.
I've been called a lot of things over the years, I'm sure I've also called many different things as well, but being named a "downvoter" by people you respected is quite something. Many look at it and think I do it for the attention, many think I just like to argue and make the place worse for others and some think I just like driving people away to keep pretending to act important to a smaller crowd rather than letting the crowd get bigger. There's these weird theories that witnesses and other big stakeholders don't want others to come in, buy and earn hive and get into big and top positions to compete against them which is quite out there considering that'd mean a 10-100x re-evaluation of the price of hive.
This brings me to my next thing, the silence in many who decide to ignore and pretend they don't see these activities is because it may affect them in different ways. If I come to defend this downvoter the downvoted account may unvote my witness account or undelegate from my project or not vote for my posts in the future or etc, etc, etc. If I defend these actions I may be bundled in with the initial downvoter as "one of the downvoters" and "destroyers of hive". It's quite political in a way as a user I've been talking to lately has mentioned that a lot of things on Hive are, whether you're a witness or not it can still get quite political as most actions or lack thereof have consequences.
Wouldn't it be great not to have to downvote at all? Fuck yeah it would, hive would be fantastic if we all came to terms and used curation the way it was meant to be used. If autovoters shifted their votes a bit more often, included new people a bit more often, removed some doing much better a bit more often. If manual curators wided their horizons a bit more often, spent more time on not just new users but the older ones as well who may have been forgotten. If trailers spread out their vote follows a bit more, changed it up whenever they noticed some abuse may be occurring, etc. If authors who did really well cared about the users who commented on their posts, forfeited some rewards here and there if certain posts weren't as up to par as the ones before or the one coming after. If stakeholders took the time to support and bother to look into new projects, throw some delegations to get some skin in their ecosystem they're building on hive, offered tools, guidance and wisdom to newer ones starting out knowing that if they do well we all do well.
Maybe it's the long winter or maybe it's the hopium being low and people generally being tired and exhausted, maybe things would swiftly change as quick as certain altcoins pump in the markets, but things aren't easy for many around here these days. Many are in survival mode or delayed mode, many may be tempted to ignore their morals to make sure whatever baseline they had in mind from their investment here to see the light of day at any cost. Many may already have stepped over a few lines and are living in fear someone might notice, while others just keep at it patiently but don't realize they're getting robbed silently day and night.
I'm not really sure where this post headed at the end, or what I was originally going to talk about regarding the title. It was a clever mix of victim mentality and I am the main character syndrome but I feel like I didn't really talk about that at all and instead about something completely different. Now it instead translates like I'm making it sound like I'm the victim when I'm not.
Hive is cool because Hive is unique, if you try to game and scheme that uniqueness in your favor then Hive may not be what you're after. I don't like it when some people use their proof of brain to game the system for easy rewards at the cost of others, and neither should you. Things aren't perfect and will improve over time, as long as we keep fairly distributing stake wide and hope many of them keep some of it so they can use it to do the same over time.
I'm worried there's been a weird shift of getting votes for giving something away that's not effort, quality and attention, but hopefully it's not that big to become a problem in terms of stake distribution and mentality of how curation should be used.
Thanks for reading.
image created with Sora