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 😀