That's like saying you wish your content on Reddit wouldn't get downvoted but it's okay if that same user goes to trending daily no matter what he submits. Surely you must see a problem with excessive autovotes that possibly no one checks on, right? I'm a bit biased cause I only curate manually but I'm pretty sure the amount of autodownvotes are a tiny percentage compared to autovotes because the former don't pay you anything and the latter does. So no, they aren't getting paid for downvoting and since you mentioned you can't edit post past 7 days I'm assuming you've not been around during some updates (hardforks) and missed out on a lot of changes. I'd recommend checking HF22 out (or maybe it was 21) that added the 25% downvote pool and why there is a need for it because literally no one was using downvotes for disagreement of rewards which meant that once in that position of receiving excessive autovotes content creators could literally post anything and make the rewards all the time while the rest of the platform and ecosystem suffered for it. I understand the respect part and that's why I often at least leave a comment explaining my downvote and I also understand why it is something difficult to grasp for newcomers and older users why there is a need for downvotes to be used and how they get a vote, see their post hit x $ and already count it as money in their pocket which makes it so much harder when they receive downvotes.

I'm no stranger to them either, after the EIP I was using them to disincentivize profitable bid bot vote buying and fighting off some very closed voting rings that only voted on the same authors on a daily basis and they retaliated on my account and my project's for months. It's just something that exists right now and it's fairly new and will be a new feeling for many on the receiving end of their first downvotes for any reason. Of course if the reason is something completely personal or dumb there will be other standing up such as @theycallmedan who showed up to check what's going on to cancel them out, but it's not easy to defend these posts trending daily and making the whole hive.blog frontpage look like r/conspiracy. Again no offense and I don't mind the genre and I may realize that Max's content is less conspiracy-ish than the rest of stuff that gets the same votes from the same bigger accounts but we're more than just that and the small negatives that come with something as experimental with this tech and economy as the newly added downvotes will surely not outweigh the rest of the pros that this technology provides, and one of them is true censorship resistance. While we may not have a truly decentralized video storing solution yet (i know 3speak is working on getting there but maybe bitchute already is (i don't know)) you can rest assured that this text from me and you and anyone on this platform will never be altered.

Oh and yeah, you can edit posts older than 7 days now (that HF change was a long time ago).