It's not an easy problem to solve and I agree that it has the potential to become a large problem going forward (LLMs make the bot problem even more difficult to deal with).

I've no idea how TheDude decides what opinion to follow but, so far, he's piloted the instance as well as anyone could expect so I'm willing to keep riding along to see where things go.

You specifically pulled up a [vote] post where that is the point. Try reading a [discussion] post.

There are votingg threads and discussion. lemmy doesn't have a flair system.