Sure, but only if it won't cost me anything directly.
Many have compared autovotes to patreon-style support in the past on this chain while many others have been against excessive autovotes (yes, I'm one of them). I do like that autovotes exist, made possible by our feeless actions on this chain and websites such as hive.vote or any custom made bots to mimic them. I am someone who does receive a lot of autovotes myself, which at times like these when I'm feeling like writing again I appreciate they are still there and that those stakeholders trust me with their support, or at least trusted at one point.
While I do try not to take advantage of it, often forfeiting rewards if I deem the content I shove out not having taken that long to create or at least think about, or some times not posting for a very long time cause I have other more demanding things to do and thus "missing out" on rewards. There are potentially some who would call me crazy for doing so because from their perspective they'd never leave money on the table that way.
Which is fine, somewhat, it's understandable given how things work, voting power regenerates, autovotes don't usually shift too often and you have a guaranteed vote or two daily as long as you keep creating content, which again, is fine.
But when does fine become not so fine to the point where some stakeholders feel like they need to intervene?
I stumbled upon an account recently who - for as long as I bothered to scroll down - had been posting daily. The content itself seemed fine, sort of like a diary of sorts and book recommendation/promotion, along with some questionable double posted identical pictures and pictures that existed in every post sort of like a footer but instead of horizontal it was vertical filling up over half of the post. This author was getting support by a whale and either a trail following that whale or through other autovote services. The author would often receive comments but none were ever voted by the author, I decided to check when the last time was they had voted and I had to stop myself from "loading more" on april 2025:
Not a single vote. That's odd, but hey, not the worst thing ever, right? Sure they're not using one of the cool things that makes hive unique where you can filter and reward your followers who consume and leave you comments, but they're at least replying to them,
Welp, not a single comment in over 1.5 years.
Is this account's activity valuable to our network? If they don't care about the community, don't care if their posts get consumed, shared, etc, what is the point of the post other than making 40-50 hive per day? Along with a few others with similar activity.
I'm currently actively downvoting some of these accounts, of course not to 0 as that'd be a bit rude/overkill, but removing 60-80% of the rewards and I think examples like these are one of the best reasons as to why we need downvote mana.
Back in the day if stakeholders wanted to downvote such obvious farms, they'd need to forfeit potential curation rewards in an effort to do so, but now we have 25% downvote mana compared to our upvote mana.
This is a straightforward case as to why downvotes are good to have, a tool to protect the reward pool from afk autovoters or malicious upvoters who wanna give free stake to people no matter if they're valuable to the network as a whole. Yet we still keep hearing people argue against them day after day and trying to fearmonger others that downvotes are what's causing people to leave and hive to die, etc.
I'd argue a very small % of downvotes are used badly, but I would say that when that happens we should speak up and try to counter it if we disagree with them.
