"There's no threat of violence for your paycheck."
You have never had any kind of dispute with the IRS. The end result is always "comply or die." There is no comparison to downvoting.
Until HIVE payout, the rewards are not your money. After payout, no one can skim off the top of your locked earnings. I don't deny there are downvote abusers. We also have vote farmers and AI spammers abusing upvotes. The claim that there is a tax effect from a downvote still does not actually make sense.
You're conflating filing taxes with receiving paychecks. You can have that same confrontation with the IRS over your social media earnings, and this reveals the mixing of apples and oranges in your violence argument. Deductions from your paycheck operate exactly as do DV's.
Regardless of these discussions, the real world has acted to reject all the sophistry and pedantry that tries to obfuscate the catastrophic effects of unrestrained taxation on commercial activity Hive enables social media to become. User retention is worse on Hive than any other surviving social media platform. The market doesn't care about what you say it should do. It responds to market forces, and has rejected DV's as unacceptable parasitism by the rich on the poor. There are literally thousands of farewell posts from the folks that have left. You can read them yourself.
No, deductions from a paycheck are not equivalent to downvotes. The payout period is a week where users can vote up, down, or not at all based on their subjective opinion of the content in question based on whatever principles they choose, an then after payout, that final sum belongs to the author and curators. In contrast, if I agree to accept $X/hr in wages, government elbows in and demands $Y/hr under threat of further theft, kidnapping, or murder for noncompliance. You can dislike downvotes, but there is no comparison to taxes no matter how you try to argue it.
"The payout period is a week where users can vote up, down, or not at all based on their subjective opinion of the content..."
So during the time when your pay for your content is withheld, the taxing authorities on Hive - everyone with stake - can devise such tax as they choose. There is a difference of course, between government and anyone with Hive stake, towards which you now venture, but your paycheck from your employer is also withheld for weeks after you have earned that pay, and the government taxes it according to it's devices before you get it and get to spend the remainder. You can pretend that goons with guns threaten your employer or you to force you to comply with their demands, but no one ever did that. You comply out of convenience. Of course Hive is different, being online, from other commercial activities, so how taxes can be employed on Hive is different than how they are applied to hourly wages or salaries, just as different as upvotes from curators are from hourly wages and salaries. The mechanisms are quite different between creating content on Hive and making things in a factory, but insofar as earning in either way is concerned, DV's are the taxing mechanism that can exist on Hive most comparable to taxes levied on other kinds of production. Taxes are what they most resemble when you compare economic activity on Hive and in other commercial activity. They don't resemble any other economic aspect of commercial activity more than they do taxes.
If you get paid for creating content there is no regular pay period, no pay scale, so these things aren't comparable to earning a salary or hourly wage, but those differences don't alter the fact that DV's are taxes on your earnings that return them to the rewards pool.
Curation is upvoting content, or not upvoting content, rewarding creators for their content or not rewarding creators for their content. DV's are taxing content and censorship because they very effectively suppress speech on Hive. That's their purpose. They are the mechanism on Hive that controls spam, scams, and plagiarism by eliminating rewards for those activities, for content that features those harms to the community, and they control it very effectively by eliminating the economic rewards of spamming, scamming, and plagiarizing people on Hive with punitive taxation. It's just like the threat Trump just made to John Deere, that the US would impose a 200% import duty on their products if they moved their factories to Mexico. Punitive taxation and other economic deprivations (like seizing bank accounts, as Canada did to people donating to honking truckers to end the Freedom Convoy) are widely used by oppressive governments to control people subject to them, just as Hive does to spam, scams, and plagiarism, and censors the speech on the platform by driving DV'd creators off it.
Of course, thousands of people have been flagged off the platform since 2017 by censors that zeroed out their rewards on every post (which continues today), exactly in the way punitive taxation eliminates John Deere importing tractors from Mexico to the US.
You're pedantry is well noted. I don't have to like it, but it's as real as death and DV's, er... taxes.