Extraction isn't always bad, what is bad however is extraction for close to no effort put into the rewards. I had to downvote a returning extractor recently who simply posts twice per day very short clips of things they also post everywhere else. Doesn't engage, doesn't attempt to link back to Hive anywhere else yet Hive is the main source of income for them due to autovotes so they don't bother to be a value-add to the community.

I was called a dictator even though I only adjusted 50-60% of the rewards down on the overrewarded posts (in terms of hive, not $ of course).

I think we should put more pressure on stakeholders to check what they're voting on and if they don't respond/care then downvotes adjusting the rewards down should be made more normal without drama involved. Just because we can see who's doing the downvotes doesn't mean we need to call them dictators and that they wanna kill Hive when they're merely spending time trying to protect the reward pool for no gain.

Best is of course if the curators agree that they may be getting overrewarded. Some favoritism is okay but if you overdo it and constantly keep rewarding extractors that bring little back to the ecosystem you create entitlement and stigmatize those trying to protect the pool.

There's plenty of other things you can vote on that aren't a negative on hive if you feel like there's too few authors to vote on so you justify it that way to overreward the few that bring little value to the ecosystem. Or simply focus on rewrding those active with a track record that they're trying to bring value to Hive over time.