I think people look at bots the wrong way. They supplement the system by providing a missing feature. Voting bots basically fix a broken promotion system. Any working feature of a monetary system can be abused though. I get that they can drain the reward pool, but even without voting bots users will find ways to drain the reward pool. You can't blame the feature for what people do. As a result, it gives way to another kind of abuse: downvote abuse which is evident from the existence of @grumpycat. Just like with the @haejin nonsense, it gave way to another community of downvoters to counter the abuse of self-voting.

The trend is to answer abuse with...more abuse. That is NOT an answer.