As I mentioned before, voting your friends manually or even automatically now and then is fine

Well, isn't this a dilly of a pickle. Speak and expose my cards, or stay quiet and hope they don't come for me next. My cousin and I are trying to get a community off the ground and are providing daily worldbuilding prompts and it basically REQUIRES us to self-vote our own shit. And even then, we've been at it for 2 weeks now and have had 1 other participant so far. (A community that has 719,000 users on Reddit and an extremely active discord server) A community that by all accounts should do great on a platform like this, where you get to monetize your creation from concept to finished product. At what point do we give up? When we decide to call it quits or when someone like yourself notices our "self voting" and decides to shut us down?

I fully admit I gave up on manual curation a LONG time ago. Nothing I want to see on the chain ever ends up trending so why wouldn't I opt to maximize ROI over what I want? Trending is all the same content, day in day out. Chain talk, low effort garbage, and conspiracy theory bullshit. (ever wonder why 3speak won't be the next youtube? I don't. Nobody wants that alt-right bs shoved in their face.) and of course, more chain talk And I don't find your answer of "downvote more content" to be helpful. We all know how vengeful and spiteful people are in general, let alone when you mess with their toys. If you piss in their cornflakes they're going to piss in yours back.

Do I want to risk a $2 auto-downvote when I can't even give a $0.25 downvote?

Nay nay.