That's the thing though, if your downvotes are based on attacking certain people due to race, religion or political belief it would be the giveaway to the reason of your downvotes. It doesn't matter if half the platform agreed with you, 90%+ wouldn't agree that it's reason to attack them through downvotes based on opinions, etc. There are downvotes that exist based on such things and have occurred over time, personal attacks, vendetta, grudges, etc and while most of the time they are shortlived, it causes a lot of attention towards it to let everyone judge by themselves if they are warranted or if they want to step in and counter them. This is one of those cases where it's good to have whales or some centralization of stake as they are more likely to come to the aid of whoever is being wronged.

Another great thing about hive is that all your actions are public, on reddit for instance you could have an army of accounts or users stalking and downvoting anything you post or say but no one would know except the perpetrator or an admin who just happened to look at the central database and notice such activity which I doubt happens towards regular users often. Here anyone could not just see it and act upon it themselves but also bring attention to it from the rest of the community.

again this is nothing guaranteed, similar to rewards so I'm not saying "no damage would occur" but then again users shouldn't take rewards for granted or assume that pending rewards means it's already in your pocket. With a shared ecosystem wide currency though it's in everyone's best interest to act upon and make sure that such attacks don't occur and more importantly don't keep occurring to drive people and traffic away.