I don't think anyone wants to stop you from writing. Your posts and pictures are really nice, and the insights into Buddhism and your culture are very interesting! I don't know anyone who disagrees with that.

It's only the vote trading that triggered the downvotes. The rewards on steem are split into content and curation rewards for a reason. Your stake gives you the option to earn with curation, while the other half is intended to help other creators grow. If you are really serious with stopping the reciprocal voting and starting to support smaller authors I will take care that the downvotes I can control stop, right now.

Voting randomly is clearly not optimal, so if you find the time it would be awesome if you spent some time to look around for what you would consider good content and support those creators. There is a lot of spam, plagiarism and other unpleasant stuff, which makes that really time consuming. That's why I created curangel and delegate most of my stake to it. You probably have mostly seen it as leading the downvote trail that hit you, but the original intention behind it was a lot more about the curation (hence the name). We have a group of about 20 people looking around all day to find quality content which deserves support, and 80% of the rewards go to the delegators. The other 20% are for the curators, which are all small accounts themselves who are here for the content. There's no share for me or the other admins - it's all about supporting the creators and curators of content which may help steem to grow its userbase again.
Delegators have the option to submit posts which received bought or traded votes for downvotes, because that needs to stop for steem to be able to grow outside of the circles of friends of investors.

Of course you can power down and do with your steem whatever you like. I just want to show you that there's alternatives. As delegators to curangel, we still receive about 8% APR, and don't have to worry about what we vote - maybe that's an option for you too.

Whatever you decide to do with your stake, and that of your other accounts, please keep posting! Don't give up on this platform just because the long-established practice of selling and trading votes is finally not accepted by everyone any more. If we all work together to help newcomers grab a foot, all our values will rise a lot more than what you could have earned with rewards in the past while the price kept dropping.