Now, I want to make it clear that this shouldn't be perceived as a "threat" or what some of you americans like to instantly get all shook about, if it was up to me I'd probably choose a more softer solution to what one could perceive this issue which I may not go deep in depth about but write about generally.
I'd like to start off with the example directed towards myself and my own projects.
Let's say that some stakeholders perceived my curation/upvoting to be not just unnecessary/not helping grow the network/not bringing value to hive/other "fair" reasons, they'd opt for countering my upvotes with equal downvotes. Naturally, this would require quite some stake since downvote mana is only 25% of upvote mana, so you'd assume they'd need 4x more stake to counter the upvotes of my projects.
I think on any given day, my own account and ocd give out about 300+ votes to unique authors. Naturally, this would mean a lot of unique and innocent users would be in the crosshair, eventually you may see authors asking me not to upvote their posts because the downvotes "look bad" or they fully counter my upvotes so they are "useless". This would be fairly understanding and I'd have to agree to stop curating them.
Now this is of course quite a wild scenario, but in the events that this would occur, it would also follow with other reactions. Since my project is now no longer doing what it is meant to be doing, they could face undelegations, witness unvotes, etc. Even if it's out of my control, it's something that one could imagine occurring. I'd eventually be forced to vote for other things, maybe @hbd.funder comments to stabilize HBD, @buildawhale comments to burn hive+hbd or if I wanted to make life harder for some curators I don't like, I could just trail their votes and now they'd have to deal with the downvotes as well, not something I'd do however but it is an option.
In the meantime, curation rewards would be flowing again because those stakeholders wanting to counter my upvotes would have to also counter the upvotes of much bigger stakeholders voting for the same thing I would. Our users would probably understand that we cannot continue to upvote them the way we used to because the upvotes would be automaticlly countered because of some reason other stakeholders had enough reason to counter them. One could argue if this is a net positive for hive or a negative, but the authors themselves would agree and they wouldn't be in a position to "demand" the votes to continue to occur. Our project wouldn't "owe" them anything so to speak.
One solution for us to continue to do what we do would be other stakeholders stepping up and countering the counter, basically. This would mean less curation rewards for both my project and for those helping counter the downvotes, but we'd at least manage to give rewards to authors in that scenario, maybe just as much as before if not more (but could also be less depending on how much stake is helping counter the downvotes), point is authors would still get something in that scenario at the cost of the curators returns.
Okay, let's now imagine another project that does things differently, and if they suddenly had a few stakeholders decide that their ways of doing curation is no longer good for the ecosystem.
I guess I kind of need to mention that these projects would be vote-selling ones, else you may not understand the point of the post.
These projects rely on people buying votes in one way or another, so stakeholders countering their downvotes would quite instantly render them useless. Authors receiving votes for votes they've purchased would instantly run into a wall, their posts not profitable anymore thus they can't keep buying more votes. They'd have to "give up" on seeing a return on those votes and start asking the seller for their money back or ask them not to upvote them any longer or start undelegating from such projects because their votes are "no good" any longer.
The project quite literally "owes" them an upvote because they've paid for one. So a counter in this case would put a stop to it quite instantly.
Now naturally, these projects could do the same thing I would do, they could opt for voting on hbd.funder or buildawhale, etc, but they'd be at least on the same earning window as other stakeholders who only earn from curation rewards. They wouldn't be able to accept more hive as vote sales would be put to a stop.
Okay, so again, I'm not trying to give people ideas, I have other solutions in mind that would only affect my own projects rather than them, but the point of this post is that if at some point the community/stakeholders deem these ways of receiving votes to be malicious and building a bad community with inflation being spent badly to a degree that's becoming too high, there are ways to put a stop to these things. We've done it before when bid bots were stopped and thankfully many of them were good sports about stopping when they understood why we were downvoting, but some others slipped through the cracks and have been allowed to grow faster to the point where I'm unsure of the effects they've had on curation, user mentality towards earning rewards, and other factors.