The stakes are different. And Hive has many more variables than traditional Social media interaction. For example:
I give your comment a like, but I give our comment a like because I like it, not necessarily because I wanted to earn from it. But I gave it a 1% upvote. Not because I didn't feel you didn't deserve the earnings, but because I want to preserve my RC's because I tend to like comments at 100% and then realize my upvote is really low when I decide to upvote actual posts I want to give a full upvote.
Someone could interpret that as me caring less about them then others, which is not at all the case.

Of course whales give bigger votes to things they care about. And if there is no-one in your niche, it gets hard. Hive is very much a hive mentally at the moment, but it is because we need each other. There is no centralized company that delegates to every project. There is a DAO. I bet a lot of people get upset that their idea isn't being funded but others do. It isn't fair, but the dynamics have also changed. We are no longer on a popularized platform with 1 million users, but in a much smaller eco-system with less than 50k users. So voting distribution is different, communities are formed differently and content discovery is different. You know that I follow you but rarely even see your posts. I often find posts that I love weeks after the payout. I found out through twitter about this video!

Whales might not have anything to gain from responding to this post. I know that if they find your content trash, they'd downvote you and probably let you know in the comments why they don't feel it is of value. In this case both Gandalf and Bernie found your post of value and upvoted.

About the one sided discussion, @lordbutterfly might not be a whale, but he gave a different perspective. I didn't like the 'GTFO' part, but he did make several points that give an impression of how others might feel. I do feel the hard fork did you wrong and kind of split up your support into a group that moved, a group that stayed but also a group that was like... we're done. But you have to reinvent. It's like YouTubers that were on top of mind for years and all of a sudden see their numbers drop. It could be the algorithm, it could be the whales, a loss of fans, saturated content, more competition (in content that needs curation). I could be devil's advocate and provide possible reasons why you'd lose traction, but I don't feel you deserve that. Like I said I respect you and you are indeed one of the people here that has always been authentic en open about everything.