I don't think, it is malicious. The problem on Hive is, that many users have delegated their HP to large curation-accounts and are not voting manually. I can imagine that many writers think, no one reads their articles, when 150 votes come through at a time.

For a social platform, Hive is not optimally geared towards social interactions. I don't know, how to fix this, and you are correct in lamenting the fact of someone not responding to a comment, but the Hive experience can be quite isolating sometimes and many people will possibly just do the bare minimum as a consequence.