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Do we abandon it to bots, or do we make something of it?

People voting themselves on day 6, voting every comment they make, or any of a number of other schemes, not excluding plagiarism or id theft, need a community response.
These people counterfeit hive.
If we let these automated schemes print money for no further effort on the coder's part we might as well abandon the ship as another pos scheme to enrich the devs.
This has been long discussed.
The crab bucket is what makes us viable as a startup.
If folks don't like it, they should help adjust the crowd.

Defi could take us away from that, in time.

How would you improve things?
If you cared to do so.

I wouldn't police the reward pool much except in extreme cases. Each person is just allocating their share of their stake. They can't allocate your share of your stake.

I would market the hell out of the social media side, I would do away with all the talk of Quality Content and let and encourage engagement and fun

small users downvoting other small users is no big deal, where this all becomes a problem is a handful of large users picking on random people.

Those large users appear to be disappearing.
It is much more up to 'us', now.
Imo.

So, it's not ok if I set up a spam bot and self vote it all I want?

They can't allocate your share of your stake.

No, maybe not, but they can reduce it, nonetheless.

Join us in the bucket, follow a downvoting trail, ride herd on those that take it upon themselves to research their flags.
Or, pushback on those not doing a good job.
Plenty of low effort counterfeiting going on.
Plenty of eyes needed to keep things on the up and up.