The impossible dream?
As one of the senior posters here on Steemit, and speaking with 
Tie the curation system to reputation, so only those above a certain reputation can upvote and downvote, preferably upwards of 30-40 reputation.
That way these shellfish (selfish!) whales that upvote themselves 100% and extract a good percentage for themselves out of the reward pool can be countered effectively and pushed under the threshold for being bad actors, selfish and greedy.
Diminish the power a downvote has and also increase the amount of voting power it uses by 10x.
Create a flagging and counter flagging system would invalidate group efforts, gangstalking, piling on of flags, and bad actors from affecting reputation, and affording the community the tools to nuke these bad actors and curtail their accounts to creating content but not voting/curating or flagging, we are many they are few.
Nobody should spend their voting power on downvotes to counter self voting whales, nor should whales have to do that or expect them to, people should have a flagging system that affects visibility and reputation regardless of vests or reputation of the user. Repeated offenses should weigh more and more to discourage them. Without wasting voting power or need to do such, people can upvote content AND flag content that deserves it or counter flag flags and in turn affecting those flaggers reputations, while revealing the content and the authors reputation, worthy content shouldn't be hidden because of vests. Money rules policing is not a viable system of policing, give us the tools to make policing the community a breeze and a positive and empowering act.
Without this balance nobody will have any incentive to downvote these collusive accounts, outside their selfless altruistic ends, but even with nuked reputations these self voting whales/bad actors can still extract rewards through their self voting, arguably even more effective since they are permahidden.
Tie the curation to reputation over 30-40, so that sockpuppet account cannot upvote the main accounts, and tie the flagging system to over 55-60 reputation or possibly higher so that the majority of people that care about building the community can police collusive self voting behavior and those that resort to flagging for griefing can be stopped effectively without draining the users voting power on these fruitless endeavors.
Htooms has said that because of one flag that he received from fulltimegeek it has earned fulltimegeek 6 months of flags from his account, granted his spineless self has caved, probably because of the exposure I brought onto his evil, trollish self, and instead turned all his accounts onto me LOLOL, there is no way to counter such abuse.
In this respect, it clearly is not fair to ask people to upvote my comments and waste their voting power on something as fruitless as this, nor do I count on any such things and if people want to do that I suggest you find something of value and give it your voting power.
Unlike the "muh victim"
who enjoys that support and adoration from her clique, I will much rather laugh at my attempted oppressors and go toe to toe with them by exposing them to the community again and again.
This flagging issue has been exacerbated recently and it won't go away soon enough.
It will continue to be brought into the spot light, even if I don't do it, because this has been a problem that keeps getting pushed farther and farther into the future by the excuse of "growing community, we will tackle it soon, it's not really a problem yet" and it's keeping the community from growing period, and losing trust in the vision and direction of the developers.
[P.S. No whales or minnows were harmed in the making of this post]