Yes. I call it pooling - even before the bots. The votes are not a good measure of quality. I recently posted my idea for MetaVotes™ but no one saw it so I'll delete it and post again sometime, perhaps with illustrations. I'm pretty sure that if folks saw it there's be at least one other vote for effort even if folks think it's a meh idea. Even if it were the greatest idea ever, there's no guarantee anyone would notice. Thus proving the pooling problem. People only vote on what has been seen before. The only good that voting does is NOT elevate the shitty posts (ie. ads and trash), sadly along with all the unseen content.

Building the MetaVote™ would take time and energy and talent and coders - so it's just a concept for the next-generation of forums. The database ramifications would be absolutely revolutionary - and this is where automatic sorting into tribes and your trusted friends idea come into play (also, STABs will be STABs and can also be easily filtered out without to much work and zero need for censorship (unless they absolutely clog the system somehow)). Meanwhile we're working with what already exists on a decentralized forum.