I've noticed that some fairly good posts are downvoted into oblivion on voat without any reason... maybe the user is an "enemy"? I'm sure there're some SBBH types that all brigade together on their least favoured users. What strikes me as odd is there is no justification on -5 -7 posts... so five or seven people downvote and don't even leave a reason? weird and not cool. just attacking a user.
Wouldn't it be nice if people had to at the least justify downvote? It's an opportunity to learn how to better post if you really fucked up as OP... however most things shouldn't be downvoted though if there's effort from OP... amiright? thoughts?
I think you misspelled "I have a problem with authority, even distributed authority, that encourages and requires good, community-minded behavior."
Your arguments are classic rote-talking points from people who want to be able to say and do whatever they want to a community without consequence. Comment votes are not free speech, do not stifle free speech as they are only a metric.
As an experiment, I've run accounts on voat that went against this "hivemind" and as long as my behavior wasn't what reddit would call "twatwaffle", regardless of the comment content or message, I never entered the realm of CCP restrictions even when in support of their precious hot topics that they supposedly stand against. You're conflating bad behavior and "wrong think" and then using that conflation to inflate confirmation bias that hivemind and community are one and the same.