The rewards made available via delegation to the numerous groups fighting plagiarism and spam make them massively more able to do so than I am able to match. My time is better spent achieving the goals I have set out to achieve with Hive and I don't have a problem leaving plagiarism combat to those who are rewarded for doing so - however, there are issues that need to be addressed in that scenario which I am helping to address here. My stake is not really big enough to make much of a downvote dent, but if a curation group is setup that shares my values then I might consider joining their downvote trail. That being said, as with all trails - I would never recommend anyone to join a trail without regularly checking on what it does.

I personally suspect that reducing free downvotes to 1 per day might be enough to bring greater balance - but ultimately, if people are going to 'abuse' downvoting, similarly to how people 'abuse upvoting' and they refuse to stop voluntarily then without a hardfork of some kind or everyone moving to layer 2, it may be necessary to set up counter downvote trails.. This would be highly inefficient, but that is part of the problem - the 'pool protection' is highly inefficient and open to biases at this point - systemic design changes are massively more effective when done right. Doing the systemic redesign effectively, requires significant amounts of experimentation, which is another reason why low cost layer 2 projects are essential.