I once had a lengthy debate on the subject with one of the witnesses. It is impossible to hold elections that have a meaningful character because of the possibility of setting up multiple accounts. I asked whether it would be possible in principle to carry out an authentification, but in order to prevent multiple accounts, it would probably be necessary to log in with your identity card details and number.

As this would hardly be done by users on the basis of this confidential data, this way of abusing accounts is not applicable. He also told me that if it were done, it would still not be one hundred percent safe from fraudulent accounts. In that sense, I find the whole debate about rewards and downvotes etc. quite useless, because you are in an environment that is not authentic.

The efforts that have been made since the last hardfork to counter abuse and to detect and weaken so-called circle jerks is not something that can be sustained once and for all if there are constantly new accounts that have to be exposed as abusive again. I think many of the fights were fought by people who already knew each other or who were actively trying to expand their circles to include other users in the fight.

Nevertheless, I would have liked to try the principle of formal consensus voting here, simply to see what the result would have been. Even if people, even if they have multiple accounts, voted on the basis of the least resistance to a proposal.

Democratic principles require a basis of honesty. But if you have an environment where that is not relevant, then perhaps the only thing left to do is to look at the whole thing as a game.

I think some people have done and are doing just that and therefore downvotes are considered something like a feature of the game. But since there are also users who don't consider this a game at all, you can't send one "player" against the other "serious taker", because it's impossible to reconcile these two mentalities.

I would even say that your own position changes permanently, sometimes you find everything quite funny and don't take it so seriously, other times you do.

What we have here is a virtual situation which cannot happen in physical life.