The votes are essentially the same as witness votes as I understand it, and therefore are indeed stake-weighted.
To be successful, an HPS proposal must get more votes, more stake weighting, than the return proposal, which has substantial weight (>20M HP IIRC). Therefore proposals that do not receive substantial weight of stake do not succeed.
What I do not understand is how to make an HPS proposal. If I did, I would make one to require an HPS proposal to add a Hive account to the #irredeemables list (or the equivalent Hive is now using, if different), and to require all the accounts on it now to be voted on the same way.
This would amount to an appeal process for users presently being totally silenced by @themarkymark and the merry censors now. If good evidence of malfeasance by those accounts exists, then folks will vote to leave them on the list.
If not, they don't belong on it.
@roadscape, @drakos, and @redbeard should join @themarkymark in presenting exactly that HPS proposal, and stop censoring people covertly. Hive needs to be censorship resistant, and presently it effects censorship just as secretly as Sun Yuchen does on Steem.
Not a good look guys, and worse yet, a slippery slope to the same shitshow Steem has become, and exactly why people come here in the first place: the utter destruction of freedom of speech on legacy centralized platforms.
How do you guys expect Hive to be any different if you do the same exact things in the same exact ways as those you want to be different from?