Just cause you asked them in one post and knowing you all are connected through Discords etc

Wrong, you do not know this and in actuality we are not all connected in Discords. The majority of the people who responded are people I have literally never spoken to outside of the comments on my posts or on theirs. We share interests and share information - there is literally nothing more going on in most cases. I do sometimes speak to V4Vapid as we are working on a Layer 2 token to try to avoid all of this nonsense.

You literally tagged them all as well, naturally many will come out and say it was manual to help you and your narrative out.

I did tag them, yes, but I had no idea what most of them would say. I actually expected more to say that they autovoted than did, in the end. I don't really have a problem with autovoting as long as it is done with genuine interest and the posts are read. I don't autovote anyone that I don't have an interest in reading posts from. There are much easier ways to make passive income than get involved in all the strife of the rewards pool - so to me the people autovoting generally will have some interest in the content or they wouldn't be doing it. Perhaps your involvement in spam fighting has left you with a more jaded perception than I have currently.

Considering the lack of engagement in general most of these authors the same curators vote it's hard to imagine it's all manual votes after having read the posts but not taken an extra minute to leave a comment which they literally are incentivized to do since comment voting exists as well.

I think what might need to be highlighted is that while we are dealing with complaints about ideological downvoting, there is also ideological upvoting. My perception is that people regularly upvote the same people, not just because they like the content, but because they oppose the censorship that these people have experienced. In these situation the upvotes are like taking a stand in a war on justice and integrity that is being carried out by either unconscious, unthinking or dishonest people. In some ways this issue is not a Hive issue but a worldwide Human issue and since Hive is a space for uncensored content it is inevitable that it will need to be addressed here.

I understand why you see commenting as a sign of engagement and is important, but you are being a bit biased here imo. You are saying that if people were really into the content then they would comment and also try to get rewards from the comments - but you are judging (wrongly in many cases afaik) that the people are only interested in the money, whereas I would say the economics and evidence involved show that they clearly aren't. The lack of comments on some of my posts does not mean that people aren't thankful to have received the information. Often, I share information that is factual or information based and doesn't really need to be discussed. I read many news articles and don't leave comments, it doesn't mean I don't value the content or am only there for some other reason. Many people are very busy and don't have time to leave comments, they do have time to leave an upvote with their own stake for content they like - which they had thought was the whole point of Hive when it comes to blogging and content at least.

Autovoting is a big reason to farmy content, lazy curation on same authors constantly and overrewarding because the votes are often the same no matter what the content because they don't read them.

Yes, I agree - it is a problem if the aim is to generally create real proof of brain and to create an end result where the network displays content that excites, interests or informs web users and helps Hive to grow as a result. The content needs to be a genuine reflection of a measurement of the presence of good logic and 'brain'. The issue is that all brains are different and people have lived very different lives, with very different experiences and so often have very different perspectives and intentions - plus subjective senses of what is valuable.

You also can't keep trying to defend it as "they just want to support them because x/y when most these authors do is just cross-post their content and the voters close to never tip or use recurring payments to want to actually support and the content to continue to occur out of sheer interest of consuming it on Hive.

I suspect you are referring to users like high impact flix etc. who aren't really Hive users, but just use the network to host content as one of many channels. That is not what I personally do - Hive is my primary channel - I even had my own personal social network before Hive existed but have moved to Hive as it solves key problems with less effort and allows me to focus more on content, which is the whole point of the exercise for me. I spent years building that network and the reality is that I have probably put as many hours in to building social networks on the tech level as some of the current coders of the Hive network. I can't speak for high impact flix etc. - and I don't really have a problem with them being downvoted to some extent - but I don't fit in that box, yet am treated like I do.

It's just blanket statements for wanting said upvotes to continue to get a big chunk of the reward pool for a niche that is very small on the internet in general

In actuality, other than porn, Infowars had one of the biggest audiences of any topic in history. Currently, infowars.com, despite being headed by Alex Jones who is far from a reliable front man, has an Alexa Rank of close to 1000 in the world. Despite him being totally deplatformed and despite him being an asshat at times, his website is one the most popular in the world. So I don't agree with your assessment, the data doesn't back it up at all. For context, Peakd is rated lower than 16,000 in Alexa - so Alex Jones is dramatically more popular than Hive in totality.

and only now is gaining more traction due to all this covid misinformation monetization and fearmongering from spinning articles and posts from reddit and other places in your own words just to make money.

I have, many times, invited the detractors to provide any evidence they like to dispute what is being said in posts - that's part of the point of making the posts - for the community to discern fact from fiction. This has never once happened, which gives most observers the impression that those involved are shallow thinkers of limited capacity who have no interest in research or thinking. This is ironic, since this is generally what the downvoters use to characterise the post authors. I personally have deliberately chosen to address your claims here by mostly only making posts which address statements made by medical or scientific experts - either that or quoting the government data directly. Literally nothing I have said has been disproven (as far as I can recall) - yet you are here lying about the situation - it makes you look either dishonest or too lazy to actually look into the topic (actually arrogant). I don't think you are a bad person, but then I don't really know you - I do, though, think that you are blind to the hypocrisy and denial you are caught up in.. Just as the majority of people are. Lazy thinking and denial has been the norm for too long.

Naturally this is your main reason for doing it, knowing jamesc and xeldal are supporters of such content and expecting to maximize their influence on the rewardpool without any disagreement in the way and when that happens you all lash out as proven time and time again.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me, tbh. ;)