The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
Sure, the “consensus view of general quality” will depend on the opinions of your user base—but if that’s the source of your objection, your issue is with the user base and not vote manipulation per se.
Your oversimplification makes it sound like this is just my personal preference, and not a natural tendency of humans or social media interactions.
This is not just “I like X more”, this is “humans on a large scale act like probabilistic decision trees and will converge on lowest common denominator dopamine fountains without careful checks and considerations”
The latter is necessary for high quality networked media and discussion