RE: Why I Feel "Trails" Ruin Steem
I think removing the ability to vote without opening the post might make more sense, but the "trails" I was talking about are the automated voting systems. People can subscribe to other people's comments and posts so they upvote whatever gets posted (for which I can see an argument), or they can give a bot permission to vote on their behalf (which is probably affected by the latest hard fork).
For example, as soon as minnowsupport upvoted this post, about 30 other accounts were automatically used to vote for it too, without the account holder's supervision (but with permission). You can see that even though it currently has 39 votes, it has only 13 views. I am grateful for the votes, but I think the very act of automated voting is damaging to the platform to some degree. Maybe it's not as big of an issue as I think. But from where I'm standing, it seems important.