The sad thing is that there is not much I can do aside from making a reply to these downvotes.

You are making this problem unnecessarily complicated for yourself, the solution is very easy: stop buying votes.

I always liked the idea that its possible to empower yourself on this platform and value smaller consistent upvotes way more compared to having to hope for the rare whale upvote.

Of course you like that idea, because in such model you're getting paid for promoting you're own content, which is a completely broken system if you know how advertisement works: those who promote are supposed to pay for it, not receive positive direct ROI. This was the reality for past 2 years, did it make the price of Steem moon? No, it didn't. The author reward pool is supposed to go to authors that the crowd decides deserves it, you don't decide you're own content's worth here like you can't decide how many thumbs ups you're content is worth in YouTube.

Instead, it's far more profitable from a curation point of view to go for the ones you know will get a ton of upvotes.

If by that you mean it is more profitable to vote on already established content creators, that is actually false. The reason being that the more auto votes start to appear around the 3-5 minute mark, the voters actually start to undermine each others curation rewards, so the more early votes they stack, the less profitable it actually becomes.

The best strategy is to find great content from yet established content producers and upvote them before others or curation guilds find them. And yes, good content will often get big votes, because there's a lot of stake curating right now. If you can't see it, you're not looking.

Just as an example of how curation groups work, making an ironic post on how great #newsteem is while what is written completely destroys the new system will instantly get curated because it's looking like another post about steem and how great it is which is the pretty much the success formula.

It's a fair point that Steem related content often gets a lot of rewards, however, non-Steem related content is also getting a lot curation. I have personally seen this change with my own post rewards.

Now, let me address the comment by Hive account@stimp1024. Purchased downvotes are not killing the idea of passive investing. It has changed the business model of bid bots, in fact, many have turned to manual curation in order to generate curation rewards to keep their delegators happy. Quality content gets rewarded and passive investors get their share. The point of the downvotes was to produce exactly that outcome where passive investors can receive passive income but not hurting the ecosystem by undermining Steem's value by allowing it to flow to the hands who have the most cash to rape the rewardpool.

Also, if a given token's only value proposition is only to get votes in STEEM, then it should not have value. The token should be able to stand alone.