Nah, the phrase circlejerks is often overused, very few vote-trade excessively as far as I can tell, those who do usually do it in an automated fashion so you can easily spot it with tools such as hivetasks.com. What you're referring to there's nothing wrong with that, we all have favorites and as you say as long as rewards don't go too crazy no one's gonna bat an eye if you're constantly just voting the same 5 people every day.
It's a spectrum however, if those same 5 people started posting less and less effort/quality posts, got less and less engagement, you'd think you'd wanna lower your votes to match it, right? Sure they're your friends but at some point if the rewards they are getting get noticible by others and the other requirements aren't up to par with the rewards there's also nothing wrong if curators/stakeholders adjusted the rewards down a bit, right?
That's what downvotes are for, you could also imagine if Hive suddenly magically went up 100x to $20 and stayed there for a while - I shouldn't be rewarded $6000 for a post that's earning me $60 today, right?
Anyway, from my glance the user was not receiving much engagement and a lot of comments were mostly token commands both on their own posts and on others, and like I said, even though purchased votes were only resulting in $5-10 value that's still $500-1000 later, doesn't mean they've been earning them in a fair manner like others work hard to strive towards.
Sure. I agree with downvotes. I do wish the upvote button was a question with a "Do you think this post should earn [more] or [less]" prompt rather than the negative connotation of the downvote. The problem with the downvotes though is when people do things like downvote the person's whole blog instead of the related content or downvote well beyond the initial earnings of the posts. Even this would be fine in my book if it didn't have an implication on "reputation" and if that user and the community in general had some other recourse to account for what could be considered bullying.
I don't dislike your idea of a one button up or down question, and yeah, I'm usually not in favor of zero'ing out posts either but when you think about the posts they've farmed daily through purchased votes with no genuine interaction or consumption for what may have been years, a few days of downvotes zero'ing posts are nothing compared to the amount they've quite practically "stolen" from the rest of the community. One could say maybe the real reason they left is because they know they won't be able to continue earning that same APR now rather than how the downvotes may have affected them. After all my only ask was to stop buying votes and they did it even on posts trying to play victim.
Fair enough.
His automated community posts are still going even though "he's gone".