Hello, i'm reading and responding with rebuttals. Congrats on receiving no downvotes by the way.

the HIVE social dApps cannot grow in any meaningful way that encourages true freedom of expression. (Why we can't have nice things.)

I have nice things on here & they are growing. Perhaps not as meaningfully or in a purely free manner of expression as it could... Yet I have minimal qualms with this rate of growth personally.
Time in real life is incomparably more meaningful when you are able to express yourself in a pure, truthful manner. Time spent online here nitpicking over how we are unable to encourage true freedom of expression (whilst not a waste of time by default) is a more tenuous task with less clear goals behind its purpose.

If there were a way to defang the stake on accounts that abusively downvote, that would discourage the activity.

There are many ways to neuter downvoting whales but for the sake of any tentative progress already achieved, I would ask that "abusive" be a term whose definition was up for an extensive, open debate.

reward-censorship tactics and the targeted downvoting campaigns that you run against others on the blockchain.

Still need to make solid the definition of reward-censorship as to me it's vague enough for open interpretation. Targeted downvoting is not vague and I can understand the form n function of that.

...contribution for most, including myself, is much more than the rewards received in return.

That's great!🤗

So when you f#ck around with the meager peanuts this place throws at the content creators, it pisses people off to the nth degree. It's not because you're stealing a fraction of what we ought to be getting in return for the time we spend growing the social dApp. It's the fact that you and a handful of other talentless f#ckwits have the audacity to null 99.8% of stakeholders who weighed in on a post, whether it was done manually or by proxy.

It pissed me off that they were targeting @ura-soul so readily. Outside of that I am not sure an equivalent time spent for growing hive vs time spent using hive and it's dApps has been a question for quite some time on hive.
Correct me if i'm wrong as I'm making such a statement due to the biggest growth factor for hive being #splinterlands and the 2nd-layer, Hive-engine-like dApps which are rapidly expanding.

You can think in that way. However, there's nothing good that can come from that mentality....

Bit of a presumption. Mentalities online either exist in a shared virtual space and form communities together, or they don't. There's nothing good that can come from presenting a particular set of mentalities as nothing good for HIVE's dAppmosphere because of their downvoting behaviour unless they are rampant trolls a.la Bernie Sanders and the like.

I'd rather see you upvote yourself grossly, as they were doing, that instead of downvoting those who aim to add quality content.

ambivalent on this one. I don't want my friends who publish quality work here punished for little to no reason and have their rewards disintegrate. On the contrary, I don't see anything good coming from upvoting your own content if it's just upvote bait and/or curation trail bait content you publish.

Stop pretending like you give a sh!t about the platform or that you're doing the chain a public service and go f#ck (upvote) yourself. I've seen you destroy one too many content creators where I think everyone should give you carte blanch to the reward pool.

How were they destroyed? also don't remember @azircon big-noting himself as a public service?

I don't respect it, and I don't respect you. And I don't have any faith in the people you vote for as witnesses if your vote causes them to do the mental gymnastics that you'd like to see from them. More specifically, the type of gymnastics that cause them to ridicule those on the receiving end of your downvotes. Put us all on the receiving end, take it directly from the pool instead of trying to spirit kill content creators. See how popular your miserable a$$ will be when you've turned the whole chain against you.

the clearest you've been explaining your arguments and delivered with conviction too. Not sure about saying spirit kill but hey, i'd like to learn more on this and "reward-censorship"