I just know how much work @pennsif does daily to look out across the blockchain and highlight news, stories, and projects that are going on around here. If his post is trending, my guess is it's because people are manually liking and resteeming the post. He is not buying votes and using bidbots to get to trending, he's getting there by doing good work. He is not a hypocrite in my opinion.

Also, don't discount the power of your downvote, it is pretty significant among most active users. You downvote might not matter to people who make 20-30.00$ per post but for someone like me who usually only gets .20-.40 cents it is significant.

As for #newsteem I just see it as a content tag - people are just using that tag to talk about projects that have evolved from the last hardfork.