You periodically encourage the use of downvotes, which can work if people don’t start taking it personally.
However, I’ve seen an example where a user who writes about travel and earns $100+ USD rewards per post goes to a curator who left a downvote and asks why they acted that way. This user doesn’t care about the platform’s economy; they care about maximizing their profit. That’s how most people think—it’s a consequence of consumer society.
On the other hand, users with a small amount of HP are unlikely to do this because of the risk of personal vendettas in return. I’ve also heard of cases where whales start wars with each other across new users' posts, which could lead to chaos.
Honestly, it’s strange to see auto-upvotes of 300–400 likes on a post within 30 seconds, while the PeakD tool shows that only 5 people visited the page, and the average time spent is 2–3 minutes—not enough to read the entire article.
Users need guidance and education. You can create as many punitive or incentive measures as you want, but if the quality of users remains comparable to that of parasites—those who only consume (in the broadest sense) without creating—then all efforts will be in vain.
You have great old posts that touch on interesting points. But users need to be engaged. The best kind of content is the one that makes users think, not just consume information. If everyone on the planet became parasites, our civilization would end. Conversely, if everyone became the opposite of parasites—creators and innovators—it would lead our civilization into a golden age.