I ask this question because there is often so much discord in regards to what is or isn't abuse on the platform that no one is ever going to be happy with all decisions made. However, when an individual uses their stake as they choose, this is considered more acceptable as it is "their voice".
The other thing I wonder is if people would then be forced to take a more active role in the policing of the platform as they wouldn't be able to "outsource" the activity to others. Part of the issue with the outsourcing is that it allows people to basically say, "it isn't my job" and leave the dirty work up to others. Perhaps once people are affected personally by bad actors on the platform, they will start normalizing the usage of their 2.5 free downvotes or at least, being more sensitive with their upvotes.
The other thing is that perhaps once people did become more active in the policing or at least recognize or be affected by the problems of not having people actively "clean" the platform, they would actually become more attached to the platform. Maintenance of something owned adds to the feeling of ownership - people tend to take pride in what they care about and look after it.
I also wonder if the platform was covered in spammers and plagiarists, would it be a bad thing? Yes, I know, it would be shit in many ways - but I wonder if lowering the barrier of usage to effectively zero means that more people will use the platform and then the content that actually does stand out as good, gets rewarded. Yep, some of it will be plagiarized from all over the internet - but how much of it will get traction for long before a member of the "public" says, what the fuck is this? and starts downvoting it.
To me it seems that there is absolutely no way to (unless using a talented AI) keep up with all of the spam and scam on the platform, so perhaps it is better to go in the other direction and let it exist and allow the open market to deal with it. Perhaps then, there will be a lot of users who come into the platform, but the curation projects will be able to find good content using due diligence and consistently support it at a much higher level - create original Hive stars. This will give incentive to the up-and-comers to actually put their best foot forward. This is what happens on the centralized platforms already - where the majority of content is utter shit that will never earn anything, even on the monetized platforms, but some are chosen as stars to aspire to.
What this will mean is that the highest stakeholders on the platform will have the voice to propel real users into the limelight and use those users as proof of concept that will hopefully attract the shitposting audience we seem to need, in order to highlight the value of posting quality consumable content that people feel has value.
Mondays are generally quiet so perhaps having a random discussion about something important and something people feel strongly about, will fill the space.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]