RE: Downvote Drama: Do regular quizzes, giveaways and competitions create value on Hive? Do downvotes destroy the platform? My consequences.

Sorry but the general view on downvotes from people always comes off like something because they've gotten used to no downvotes.

You don't see people on Reddit complaining about their posts getting downvoted, whether or not they're earning from it is mostly no but some times it could be a link share to their youtube where they could earn from adrevenue. Just because Hive openly tells you who downvoted your post creates a lot of unnecessary drama, demands start flying as to why and often people look for ways to retaliate or compare with others who didn't get downvoted at the time.

Most of this all just screams entitlement in my eyes.

Excessive self-votes or vote-trading can be just as bad as downvotes if not worse as it affects the way you grow on the platform. If you're at 100k HP mostly from having self-voted and vote-traded but another user reached 100k after 2x longer time cause they've put a lot more effort into getting there without self-voting/trading then how is that fair and would a little downvoting making your journey to 100k take a bit longer or at least the same amount of time as that other user destroy the platform? I don't think so.

When it comes to retaliatory downvotes or usage based off of disagreement other than rewards it is important that the community steps up and counters them, even with the risk of getting downvoted in the process and earning less curation rewards due to the counter. Luckily we don't see those downvotes often these days but it requires some additional effort to counter "bad" downvotes but there are tools to make that happen.

So while that is serious, occasional downvotes like the ones in this example aren't all that bad, usually both the downvoter and downvoted person get over it eventually, or should at least, I know some people really love holding grudges and maybe that says more about them and their view on money.

It's important to remember that this is mining gamified, some times something unexpected can happen and that doesn't usually mean there's a problem with the network nor should authors get used to it always being sunshine and rainbows once they make it and have stake as we see on steem and blurt. The pros of having downvotes far outweigh the cons and bad usage of them, until the day I see downvotes used excessively and in bad faith a lot I'll stand with that opinion.