I'm with you, brother/sister.

This platform has hooked me, hard. And while I see that anything of value will end up being gamed, I still get rather indignant and upset at people exploiting it for short-term gains.

Humans making messy human decisions to weed out the abusers can work, but its hard to scale that expertise into something that can combat a large automated force.

I don't know what the ultimate solution is. By having something worth stealing, people are going to do their best to take it.

On the flip side, there will also be people that enrich the platform because of the potential for rewards above and beyond validation and adulation from their followers.

The only partial answer I have is flagging down any accounts that are harvesting self-votes and making spammy nonsensical comments. But again, human judgement is needed.

Thanks for your post, gave me a lot to think about. Maybe a solution will present itself in time.