Downvotes mainly helped curtail some of the abuse that was committed by the smaller actors/groups. I tried to downvote any obvious spam/plaigairism and especially if they had paid bidbots for votes. However, I knew better than to start flagging the whale accounts that were doing basically the same thing, albeit more stealthily in some cases and using all sorts of other methods to literally extract as much "ROI" and/or gain as much SP as possible from this chain. If it wasn't for fear of retaliation, more might try to speak up against what they saw as abuse. Since the incentive to scam in crypto is so high, some way to locate, mitigate and/or nullify this abuse (regardless of stake size) is definitely still needed, IMO.