What constitutes 'mischeivous' things?

This is different for everyone. For me, it can be fully AI generated posts, or plagiarized content to give a few examples. I don't really downvote people, and I'm not a whale for my votes to matter all that much though.

I agree with your second statement, and from the whale posts I've seen they're not really downvoting just for taking Hive out. What I did see is them limiting their votes to those that build their accounts; which they have every right to do.