Sorry but weren't xeldal and co also downvoting any/everything @themarkymark curated thus pushing him to stop his autovote support? I just feel like this got missed somewhere but needs to be said, it's not just that they downvoted his posts AFAIK, in that case it definitely would be quite shitty by Marky to do this. Just trying to stay a bit neutral here and look at how the events unfolded but have been super busy the past few months to stay up to date on these things.

I have seen some of the accounts that xeldal were upvoting for a long time, aside from the influencers who were quite inactive apart from cross-posting, there were some really fishy accounts that gave me sockpuppet farming vibes. In many ways that was also abusing the reward pool, ecosystem and taking from everyone else, albeit not as directly affected as many accounts are now.

I do however respect that xeldal has started spreading his votes out more lately and wish they could find a common ground and leave each other be while making sure that this is how Hive's meant to work. You can't get your way to vote on whatever forever if the community finds the content/activity of certain accounts unwarranted of rewards. Just because one or few stakeholders are the ones doing the downvoting doesn't mean that they're the only ones who think so, most just don't downvote or ignore the option completely.

Not sure what the best solution could be here, maybe we'd need certain stakeholders to curate/upvote those receiving xeldal upvotes or/and marky downvotes where there's more people deciding on it and that way try to get xeldal/marky to leave those that the community interfered with be. Would appreciate your thoughts on this possible solution here @themarkymark & @xeldal.

As a simple example:

xeldal upvotes @deraaa, marky counters the downvote
a team of multiple curators, maybe something @dreamsteem could set up would check what these two bad boys voted that day and take it to a vote if the content/user activity is worth defending to counter with a positive vote.
xeldal gets more curation rewards from that account/post and marky notices that this vote was valid and places said account on a list not to downvote or maybe to even upvote in the future.
At the same time we could do the same for Marky and xeldal would respect the same rules, i.e. if marky upvotes something and xeldal counters but the "community" "deems it worthy" they'll stop downvoting that account in the future.

This could filter out which accounts/posts not to downvote and give the community a bit more say if both parties were up for it and if the community doesn't vote/counter certain downvotes on the initial upvotes from either or, they'd have to just make due with the fact that maybe that was a valid downvote or a too high of an upvote.

This would mean someone (possibly me), would take a big cut in curation rewards for some time forward but the outcome would be that xeldal would get higher returns and marky could upvote content again, edit: and of course more peace of mind among innocent authors new and old.