bureaucracy. The more rules you implement, the more checks and balances, the harder it gets to actually use the platform.
Yeah I mean downvotes are really not that much used in general, I personally only use them in extreme cases like the example above where an author receiving close to no attention/views and going so far as to clip videos/performances into 5-10 different posts while maximizing rewards by strategically posting twice daily. Other times I may use them if some people are really going out of their way to be asshats and lose their minds either over downvotes or other things that generally wouldn't be accepted anywhere and I doubt anyone "normal" minds that they get downvoted for it.
My point is, there's not going to be too many rules per se I don't think, like you're not going to see people using downvotes to nitpick things like "oh this post is at $125 but I personally believe its value should stay at $115" cause it's not worth the general feeling/drama/reasoning etc to be that precise or use the downvote option too often.
I wouldn't say there are too many abusers, this case for instance an abuser was created due to potential negligence of voters. If left unchecked this user would've continued as they have to not bother providing value in different ways or at least trying by being social, building connections, etc and continue to earn excessive rewards compared to others who provide more things here and spend more time/energy/life-force to be here and get something back for it. There may be instances where some voters insist on wanting to reward some authors more than what the perceived value they bring is worth it to others, thus discussions can occur and usually a balance is reached after reasonable explanations and outlook of the situation, but some times that doesn't happen and things go a bit off the handle with retaliation downvotes, targeting innocent authors the downvoters trying to balance things upvotes - even if those themselves aren't being excessively overrewarded - in an effort to stop the initial downvoter, i.e. threaten/blackmail/etc. Or generally some bigger users letting the power go to their heads and using downvotes as a way to punish some for disagreeing with them for random things, etc, but that doesn't really happen much and since there's no censorship here and downvotes usually bring more attention to posts (as you say you found this one by trailing downvotes) - others can then judge if the "bully" is being a bully and if they should intercept in countering their downvotes or not. There's always a bigger fish in the sea, etc.
Thanks for the long answer. So the cases you describe are more outliers that could be "tried in court" in some way, being checked by the rest of society - and they're not the masses, which is good.
I see more danger in the other argument you make, the quality of content. With commercialization of posts I read in your original post that quality of content is degrading in order to auto-vote-farm - basically something that has already happened on web2 platforms. Quality content is not for the average user, so average content gets more attention, leading to everything becoming just average because the quality-providers give up after a while. Did I understand that correctly?
If so, that is a big danger to the plattform. I personally manly write about Splinterlands, and even there I can see a lot of different types of vote-farming. Still, I do not downvote since sometimes it could be an honest mistake, and I don't trust people to react open to critics, or even downvotes (definitely constraint view here).
The question would be if there's a way to prevent that - though I think your post is one of those ways, bringing the discussion rolling in a civilized manner, and hence creating awareness for the subject. I for myself will be more attent on the subject now, so you can count that as a success 😅
P.S.:About the downvote trail - I follow some because they bring me to posts like this, outside the SPL part of Hive. But I always try to double-check them and if it was wrong, I vote the same amount positively on the post to be even (I hope it works that way). On this post, it was a commentator that started insulting and swearing, and I had to read through the comment-trail to understand what was going on. Very nice example for your argument, actually 😀
Compared to web2 I think it's nice that we can adjust the pending rewards a bit here, as you say many there become repetitive, farmy, etc, once they've "made it" and advertisers/adsharing doesn't care about that as long as they get the views. Naturally we can have ads here too and it may at some point become a big part of the rewards but if we see some authors earn too much stake from repetitive/farmy/posts with the intention to just extract/take as much from the pool as possible for selfish gains, we can jump in and adjust that a bit without affecting the adrevenue part but protecting the ecosystem.