The voting mechanism to me can be a solution. The issue I see as a problem is that if a platform is based upon anonymity then how do you guarantee that each account is one person, that they have only one account, and that they are not something like a corporate or shared account?
If it is by invitation that would seem to be a way to protect against this unless the invitation is sent to people you only met online. It is not difficult to appear to be multiple people online. Thus you could potentially get more than one invitation.
Time will weed out the alt-accounts due to their actions/lack of actions affecting Rep Score.
Not necessarily. It will only do that if they have too many, they make mistakes, and/or they appear abusive.
If they don't do any of those things they could still effectively end up with more voting power than other people. It would require some effort of maintaining multiple accounts but if the number is kept small multiple accounts is not the same as a bot.
A bot is automated. People could manage a half dozen or less accounts by logging into them at different times, different browsers/systems, etc. and manually operating them.
I was doing this in early experiments myself in the early 90s before WWW even took off. I had multiple accounts on a BBS system and we had a game back then that was basically trying to expose each other.
I kind of intentionally developed a unique personality and way of communicating depending upon which account I was using. I did this so they would appear very distinctly different from who I am. In this case the BBS also had a place we would all go at various times to physically use them (on campus) so sometimes we'd use that factor to try to discover each other.
I had my primary account...
I had one called Bandaid that was always trying to offer to help people and that was their core personality.
I had another called Technoterrorist that was an asshole but not a troll. I never have been into trolls. I just intentionally was more aggressive with that one. It was long before 9-11 and any of the negative connotations that name has today.
I had another called Chaos Poet who communicated exclusively in poetry mostly of a chaotic fashion. That ironically was resurrected on Steemit and was my first big pay day on Steemit. I had a back and forth dialog in comments once with it where all my responses were poetry I wrote on the spot and I think I made $900+ on that exchange just in the comments. That was insane.
When I wanted to keep them separate people had NO CLUE they were me. Not one of them was every discovered even by my closest friends.
On steemit I quickly intentionally ended any anonymity on the various accounts I had as I didn't want anyone to be able to see me using different accounts and jump to conclusions that didn't exist. I mostly used different accounts back then so I could focus on specific interests for each.
@dwinblood, @newsagg, @chaospoet, @seductiveart, @becauseisaidso, and @metal4ever are all my accounts.
The only one I've been active on with hive really has been @dwinblood.
Oh to further story. I did write a bot for that BBS back then called Victor Mindmeld that actually posted on the BBS and responded to its own email. It was rather primitive and it made up email responses and BBS posts by parsing what people said to it. It was kind of an advanced Eliza/Racter type AI thing. It was very flawed but you'd be floored by how many people thought their conversations with it were with a real person.
It certainly was not even remotely something that should pass a Turing Test but surprisingly many people fell for it anyway.