The issue here is that if you follow a downvote or upvote trail, that trail will eventually do things you dont agree with.

It's really time consuming to personally get everything that is upvoted or downvoted. The informationwar has upvoted stuff before that we had to later remove the upvote, but everyone who follows the trail also has to remove the upvote which they have to manually do. They usually dont remove it as who has time to be on hive daily.

That can create scenarios where people dont know their power is being used to downvote stuff they wouldnt want downvoted(or upvoted).

Lately the downvoted people are responding back, which creates bad PR for the downvoters and headaches to deal with theh didnt previously have to. Any bad PR with downvoting on Hiveis bad PR for decentralized and or free speech movements, there isnt any way to explain ones self out of it.

I think the best thing for most situations is to not join a Downvote Trail. The old ways of people being downvoted by huge amounts or nuked and accepting it are over, ideological downvoting has consequences. Some of the top witnesses will start to see they arent so high up as their support is eroded by the people they ideologically downvoted. @logiczombie and others are banding together and getting the word out to people to unvote the witnesses who downvote things that arent spam/illegal content/plagiarized content/etc.

Nobodies reign lasts forever and some of the top 20 witnessed could lose their spot just by asking 1 or 2 people to stop voting for them. Nobody is going to put up with this stuff any longer, this is a 5 year old chain and we need to move past ideology based downvoting permanently.