I know it's wrong to get involved in serious matters one knows little about. Have you been caught up in the crowd mentality? Grab yourself a pitchfork, I guess. Your question gives me a chance to inform you (and others) on some things.
Anyone informed on the circumstances knows that for the longest time I refused to like my own content, and even got into arguments with people who did so, claiming it was unfair, inorganic, selfish, lame, etc. After at least a couple years of that, someone finally convinced me "you're hurting nobody but yourself by being noble", and so on. And it's true, there's no rule against voting your own content on Hive, and it doesn't necessarily have any negative impact on the blockchain. For example, the big whales drop $200 upvotes on their own (often short) posts, and that's neither against the rules nor community expectations. Such posts end up on the Trending page. There have been many debates about changing the settings to prevent self-voting, but that has not been done.
So, I joined the majority, and started liking my own posts, using my personal investment in HIVE plus my earned HP to benefit myself, as well as many others I curate. Sometimes when I had good comments that didn't quite reach the 2c cutoff mark for payouts, I topped them up. I also used votes of varying sizes to lift quality original comments up, leaving spammy bot comments (like pizza bots) toward the bottom, to facilitate discussion. All this is neither against the rules, nor greedy, nor uncommon.
When you say "hiding it", you seem to believe that's possible. It isn't. Most of us who use this blockchain regularly are aware that everything we do (every click, every character, every timestamp, etc) is permanently recorded and available for all to see. Even after deciding I was morally okay with it, I was still hesitant to vote on my own posts, until I did it a few times on some high-quality productions, and realized nobody cared. In fact, I saw that I had been one of the only people who never voted on their own content. I had handicapped myself for no good reason.
My wife and I are both regular posters, commenters, and curators. We spend time on this blockchain EVERY day, sometimes quite a bit of it. We've always been clear which accounts are ours (and that information is also publicly available on the blockchain). When we make posts, say as @GirlsofGreen (our cannabis modeling account), we generally both upvote those posts. And we share marital finances (don't have "separate money"), so sometimes we've got our stack (currently ~18000) divided up between us, and sometimes I've got 99% of it here on my @DRutter account, like right now. None of this is wrong, harmful, against the rules, or unusual.
Another thing you're just not aware of is that after about a year of that, after several chain forks and community changes, someone (in a comment) told me that it was now considered "tricky" to upvote things in the last day of the payout week. I don't believe that's actually a rule, but it had become a social norm, and I voluntarily agreed to the change. Since then, close to 100% of my votes are before that, day 1 to 5.
And yet, many of the whale downvotes I'm getting now, are coming in on day 5 and even 6, which doesn't give others a fair chance to respond. But nobody's going to say things about the downvoting whales, because, well, they're downvoting whales.
You (and others) seem to have jumped to conclusions - and onto a bandwagon. "Guilty! Guilty!" Mob mentality to come up with a verdict... days after the sentencing and execution already took place!?
Nobody really investigated, the facts were never brought forth, charges were never laid, analysis wasn't done, arguments were not presented, there was no debate, 3rd party consultation didn't take place, no basic rights or norms of justice were observed. Just financial warfare (akin the financial terrorism the Canadian government is currently waging against Freedom Convoy and other Liberty-minded people)... because someone with a lot of influence on the crowd said so. He who has the most Hive Power wins, even if what he's saying is based on inaccurate assumptions, or perhaps a personal vendetta.
This is why there's due process in civilized societies, not the law of the jungle, barbarism, and bullying we currently have here. As you know, ALL this is recorded - immutable, in fact - and at some point very powerful computers and programs will be leveraged to scour and analyze everything (EVERYTHING) that we're doing here. It might not be very long from now. Total discovery. Anyone breaking the rules (no matter how long ago) will be revealed, everybody infringing on others rights will be discovered, everybody who was corrupt, or greedy, or selfish, or harmful, will be brought to light. Even things people think they've gotten away with forever - they haven't. Even things we didn't do will be possible to detect, analyze, and potentially judge, one way or another.
So ultimately, I have nothing to worry about. But in the short term, I'm being threatened with the loss of FIVE YEARS of full-time effort. I have loved this blockchain like it was my own, and helped to build it, providing real, quality, original content that you can't get anywhere else. I've followed the rules and adjusted to changing behavioral expectations.
But I haven't escaped the abuse of blockchain bullies, each with a different set of expectations and understandings of the rules, each with massive stakes that can (and sometimes do) totally crush my content, drive away my curators, and demoralize my wife and I. She's sacrificed so much for 5 years now, including often not having me in bed at night because I'm putting the finishing touches on a post, researching a project, or still clicking through my daily curation. We've made life choices based on our involvement here, and more recently, based on our presumed forthcoming income. We just powered down for our first ever payout, to help cover rising inflation, and our newborn. Now we've lost not only several hundred dollars in payouts over this downvote mob situation, but potentially everything else we worked for. All someone has to do is dedicate maybe 10% of their free downvote power to completely negate everything we do here, and eventually, drive our rep low enough to hide our content. Bullies can have their way here, even when they're wrong, as long as the blockchain crowd can be persuaded.
There are real threats to this blockchain, which potentially deserve a concerted attack by orcas and whales, picking away at payouts, reputation, and visibility, until the offender is nothing but a bleached skeleton on the sandy bottom. MediKatie and I are not in that category, and the disproportionate punishment being meted out here - endorsed by the insensate horde - is a far greater threat to Hive than 100 years of our commenting and self voting could ever amount to.
Besides, if something we're doing is against the rules (or platform community patterns), a comment or email would have sufficed. We may be anarchists but we still shovel the sidewalk.
There's absolutely no good reason for what's going on here. It looks bad for us all, especially Hive, and could have been avoided.
@HiveGestapo? Gestapo; the brutal fascist police force known for kidnapping, torture, experimentation, and murder of anyone in the way of Hitler's totalitarianism. I find your association of the name with Hive to be as imprudent as it is uncomfortably accurate. One can only hope that was some misguided attempt at dark humour - and of course, you have that right. Either way, it has given me an opportunity to clear up some misconceptions.