That was a very interesting read, thank you. A lot of comments, which I also studied with curiosity.

I would like to add some thoughts which might not be new, but nevertheless, I throw them in:

The whole thing sometimes seems completely nonsensical to me. Here is a virtual sphere that is created by its design in such a way that it is easy to exploit it. And yet we are arguing and fighting about something that cannot escape exploitation because not all participants have the same grasp of the matter. From a more nihilistic perspective, one could let the matter go, the fewer efforts to stop exploitation, the clearer it becomes that one cannot stop the end and the matter has its weaknesses from the beginning.

I wouldn't know how to answer whether the downvotes were responsible for stopping some participants from doing further damage, or whether all exploiters could actually be identified, etc. Difficult to judge something like that at all. In any case, everyone exploits the reward pool, no matter what they may claim. This is not real land, not real matter, not real communities. In my view, they are substitute spaces for the loss of risky and spontaneous models of life that we modern people lack and whose loss we try to compensate for by retreating into our mental and abstract minds and believing we can tap into a virtual space like a material one. But the very possibility of creating multiple accounts, automating a large part of the actions here and then caring little about the content, is a stark departure from the material world. We could not do that in physical space. If we no longer pay attention to a sphere, for example, if we no longer enter an environment, nature takes it all back.

Here, if the pool were left to the bots, the bot farms and the auto-votes, it would be interesting to see how quickly the whole emptied of its meaning (and the pool), no? I imagine only programmed entities distributing the votes to automatically generated content and everything going round in circles until the pool empties. Where some joker or otherwise motivated human user installs some settings and doesn't bother with it after that. I wonder how many such actors there are who do this? How little must someone care about their own actions, how little curiosity must they possess, to stop returning to the scene?

I mean, who is surprised if an environment that invites people to use it as a passive source of income does not also attract those who intend to do just that? Where it's so easy to do it, people do it, don't they? So I would say it's more like a game, a thing that some take very seriously and others don't, with a lot of shading in between.

Not that the debates are useless, because in fact, if you want, something can be learned from them. It's striking how often I've read the phrase "I'm wasting my time" since I've been here. If I were to utter such a sentence in regular repetition, and I read it regularly from certain users, it amuses me, because apparently a realisation takes hold there.... However, people continue to "waste time" - haha!

The ambitions to regulate upvotes and downvotes, to governmentally monitor this distribution, and the many arguments I heard, the whole thing reminds me of national governments that seem obsessed with racking their brains over how best to control what. Completely forgetting and neglecting that no one has a real overview of local events that are only addressed locally, precisely because different people have different qualities in their respective space-times. You can trust people with more than you generally do or trust yourself with. Which is a pity, because human beings are fascinating creatures if they thought a little more of themselves and did not lack so much trust.

In principle, I would not have much objection to the pro-downvote arguments given by the individual actors, if they behaved less like government people and more like people who admit that they have no solution but convictions just like very personal interests. What bothers me, therefore, is that I read little doubt or questioning from the very actors who made or make governing their business. What a burden, I would think. Instead of giving or letting go of it, they continue to "waste time" explaining and establishing their own position. Not even in the seemingly democratic organisations, however, does anyone stay elected beyond four years.

There are things which cannot be fixed, which do not have a solution. I think, the mental mistake is, to seek (final) solutions where there are none. The way to deal with a given issue is to navigate within the ambiguous space of tension and to stay creative.

Have a good day.