The rant was about the difference between automated downvotes that take place when posts are published vs automated downvotes that take place at the last second.
Hive-Watchers' downvotes take place when the post gets published.
The HW downvotes provide valuable information to curators.
I am happy when I see @spaminator downvoting a post as it warns me of potential abuse.
The downvotes that take place just before payout don't provide information to curators. Last minute downvotes take the rewards from the curators.
I tend to upvote outsiders. I went through my upvote trail a month ago and found that I was losing about 15% of my curation rewards to the last minute upvotes.
The only way to catch a last minute upvote is to look at the post history of each publisher. One has to load the author's post page on peakd.com. One then has to scroll down to show two weeks of history.
This adds about 15 seconds to each curation. I do 70 upvotes a week. I have to spend an extra 30 minutes a week to figure out which authors are getting the sneaky down votes.
It also means that I can't use the tribal sites. If I look at a post on hiveme.me; I have to load the peakd.com post page to see if the post is getting sneaky downvotes.
Conclusion
Hive-Watchers auto-downvotes posts soon after publication. This provides information.
The sneaky downvotes hurt the platform.
!BEER
RE: Checking HiveStats and Lamenting Sneaky Downvotes