Disclaimer: this is not perfect and I am absolutely sorry for the inconveniences. I am not responsible for what happens after this post.

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Upvotes, used to say that the upvoter gave honor to the upvoted’s post. What happened to be just signs of honor suddenly became the near currency of all. People trade for upvotes, people demanded upvotes, people threaten to downvote as ransom, et cetera. All of this ruins the creative aspect of the game because we see the rise of greedy people demanding upvotes and posting poor quality crafts, successor or not, to earn more upvotes.
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But how did it become so bad?
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First of all, we will look at how upvotes work. To upvote a craft means to give honor to said craft for the maker of said craft. To get many upvotes means to ascend to a higher status, due to the existence of “ranks”. This is the main reason why self-entitled people who want more upvotes exist, because not only do upvotes serve the same function as a like in a social media application, but also because upvotes serve as a vehicle to ascend to a higher status, which are regarded as powerful signs of power; people in higher statuses get more fame and can influence other people in their area of influence and gain more upvotes because they are famous.
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All of this comes down to human nature. You cannot survive without fame, since you’ll be easily left out to die. To avoid this fate is to crave for fame and power, and the ranks had fame and power in them, which means they are considered social statuses. This is why simplerockets.com has more ranks than simpleplanes.com, because the users crave for ranks to outmoded the lower one, the rank and upvote system being kept because users do not want to lose their power and fame associated with such ranks. This is also why upvote abuse, while not common, commonplace because they want to ascend to a higher rank to gain more fame and power (and therefore more upvotes).
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The impact of this greed culture means that if someone or something does not meet expectations, they may accused of doing bad deeds (e.g. abusing the upvote system, et cetera) and be thrust out from this community. The expectations exist because it is easier to stereotype than to do research. There was once an user who had low quality crafts. However, he did manage to gain a lot of upvotes, which alienated users so much they began to Harras, bully, and threaten him to the point that he deleted his account for his safety (the same miserable user had another account, but when the community found out the new account was the same, miserable user again in hiding, the cyberbullying happened and he deleted the new account, never to return). Another incident occurred relating to an airbrake-laden, poor quality plane that suddenly got a lot of upvotes and gained meme status, due to an user creating a forum post inviting users to upvote said craft and they did; they hopped onto a bandwagon. Others were not happy a poor quality plane got a lot of upvotes, since they expect high quality planes to get upvotes, and a battle erupted both in the comment section and the forums. The drama lasted for months and the meme status died out. Now the craft now sits at 4th place in the most upvoted crafts section (I think I remembered when a decent craft, now in the 1st place of most upvoted aircraft, got published. It was so good it got many upvotes but it then caused drama because it did not look good enough to warrant such high upvote count). I can already document a lot of stereotypes associated with ranks, but I kind of lack more research, so here are the stereotypes:
-High rankers are often depicted as either generous people or greedy misers. Most platinum users do so for the fun and likely do not care about upvotes nor the ranks.
-Low rankers are usually stereotyped as noobs, unimpressive and lacking in both behavior and quality. Low rankers are more diverse than high rankers with some uploading high quality stuff but don’t get upvotes, and some being kind but unable to make high quality planes.
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Now that I have posted this paper of mine, hopefully this will explain the poor-quality successors, the “jelly planes”, upvote trading et cetera. I hope this post will help you guys try to research and overcome the problems associated with the upvote system. There have been efforts to reduce the abuse stemming from the upvote system:
- High quality crafts from low ranking users are more likely to be featured to not only ascend them to a higher rank but to encourage other users to build high quality crafts.
- There are already rules in place with moderators to enforce. Some of the most basic rules include “no upvote trading” and “no begging for upvotes”, but as the methods to illegally abuse the upvote system evolve, so did the rules (e.g. the “no posting successor crafts without successor tag”, since the original creators get a share of points from the upvotes of the successor).
- The community now has an aversion of upvote abuse but rules lawyering and a sense of justice can lead them to the extremes, such as the upvote-related incidents that have occurred on the site.
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Feel free to post in the comments for something I missed.
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Maybe we can solve the problems together, I don’t know...