Thanks for sharing your story here. As someone who has been censored by silicon valley to a criminal degree for decades, I specifically value Hive as a way of overcoming that. We have all probably already heard the arguments for Hive's downvoting 'not being censorship' because it doesn't actually remove anything from the blockchain, but this is a half truth since people rely on reward payouts to help fund future content creation and to fuel growth. If an account is limited in terms of it's rewards compared to others, then it will probably be limited in growth and reach too - which amounts to an outcome that is equivalent to censorship. Perhaps censorship is the wrong word and we might perhaps be better to use the word 'controlled'.

The valid argument for downvoting is that ALL rewards on Hive come from the stake that stakeholders put in, so while we don't directly send a reward to someone we upvote from our own wallet, we DO effectively pay for it from our wallet since the constant inflation process devalues the value of Hive overall. This, though, is also an argument against downvoting too - since downvoting effectively allows people's stake to be devalued maliciously.. If we don't get upvotes coming in, then our own stake loses value over time due to inflation.

The bottom line is that this is all an experiment and it needs to be carefully adjusted to generate the best outcome for everyone. There are definitely those who don't seek to achieve that and instead intend to just generate the best outcome for themselves personally while claiming to be acting in everyone's best interests. Yes, this is identical to the centralised political systems. I have said since the very beginning that this would happen because the problems are inherent to capitalism. There is no technology that can fix this cause unless it fundamentally changes the nature of society as a whole.

In terms of practical ways to address the issue of malicious and heartless downvotes on Hive, there are only so many options. The one option I suggested years ago is for UIs to include a page where downvotes are listed and monitored, to allow the community to expose malicious patterns and take action as a group if they disagree with the 'policing' that others are enacting. This has never been done and remains a good idea imo.

Unfortunately, taking action to target one account that causes problems and lowers the value of the entire network can easily be spun as exactly the action that you are trying to stop - since the SUBJECTIVE valuation of posts is exactly that - subjective. Each individual person can view the same scene in a completely opposite way to someone else. They may not be able to prove their position to others, but they hold it none the less. Stake weighting allows for this. Unfortunately, again, the level of delusion held by many people means that they will argue to their death that filling the sinking ship with water is actually the solution to the fact that the ship is sinking and not the other way around.

Arguably, then, community response to malicious attack is necessary and this requires community spirit and the shared understanding that such response is needed. Exposing the attacks is step 1.