I witnessed the group behind all that rubbish in the early days when I was invited to private chat group (likely because I was one of the only girls at the time). They are just terrible ppl I don't think they ever wanted the platform to grow right from 2017 they would just laugh in private about downvoting newbies to zero and taking the piss out of them, then being all nice to them in the chat. The chat was owned by some woman called illuminaughty or something like this. I am sure it goes far deeper than that also.

They were the reason that it's not 10 times the size now. I genuinely think it has to be some kind of experiment on controlling people on social media as it's just clearly not designed to be a platform that actually grows in numbers as they chase everyone off who has any real world following. A bunch of famous ish bloggers joined at some point and they downvoted them all to 0. It's a joke of a site controlled by a handful of ppl who moved from Steemit.