Until today, I had no interaction (comment, upvote, or downvote) with @gtg, former top witness of STEEM and now top witness of HIVE.

Not very surprising, as gtg has been a top witness with significant steem power but I was nobody - who occasionally writes in a non-English language and plays games like steemmonsters - who did not have much steem power.

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This morning, my Steem neighbor told me that he saw a previous top witness shamelessly milking rewards. So I followed his link and saw this:

• by the way, I do not know how to set 100% SBD option - isn't it either 50% SBD/50% SP or 100% SP?

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I checked what these were:

Yes, he was making lots of spam comments and self-voting on his first posting Hello, World! dated Jul 3, 2016.

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I was disappointed. I know that he was not happy regarding the current situation of Steem and decided to move to HIVE - and then why is he doing such disgraceful things here instead of improving HIVE?

So I decided to downvote them, even though my stakes are not big so my downvotes only cost like 0.14 STU, as a sign of disappointment.

• I am pretty sure that most people agree that this crap should not be worth more than $3 rewards.

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When I got back home after a few hours, I found that gtg decided to retaliate, and downvoted me three times.

When HIVE first started, since I was one of the "blacklisted" users who did not get HIVE airdrop, I did not login for a while. But later some of Steem neighbors encouraged me to use HIVE at least several time to test, I wrote two short postings after claiming previous rewards (otherwise I didn't have enough RC as my HP is zero).

And I guess I should stop trying HIVE, as now the top witness with more than 472K power decides to downvote me, which made my posting rewards zero. I am okay with them going to zero per se, but I feel bad about my neighbors who voted me to make me feel better using HIVE, as their efforts are in vain.

• gtg's HP:

• My posting now shows zero reward "thanks to" gtg's downvote:

• All my HIVE postings (only two, fortunately) went to zero.

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In retrospect, now I understand why the neighbor who reported gtg's shameful spam+self vote milking did NOT downvote it while he thought it was despicable.

He expected potential retaliation - downvotes - and didn't want that.

It reminded me of the past - I didn't (in fact I couldn't) downvote some crap as I feared that I would get downvoted as retaliation.

And even when I get downvoted sometimes for ridiculous reasons like "not English" or "no thumbnail", I chose not to fight back as the counterparty had too much steem power compared to what I have.

Yes, I admit that I was a coward who just waited these downvote bullies to find another victim.

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At least, from now on, I will try not to be silent and do what I believe to be correct.

• Even though I lost a lot (in terms of the current token price) more by getting downvotes from a whale, I do not regret my action.

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• Update: @steemit, while I appreciate that your vote would put this posting on trending so that many users may have a chance to read this, I believe that the posting reward would be too much - so please remove the upvote before the payout.