What do you think about the idea... of removing rewards for voting? My theory is.. that those rewards are incentives for bots, but people actually do not need an incentive to vote, because great content is for them very often more valuable for them than few cents. Good article about programming can save me hours of work!
I think, people which are passionate about certain things, will vote for their favorite stuff without being paid for that.
That might make sense if you have enough people reading, but with today's numbers of users I think too many posts would go without many votes.
Also, I really think that humans + bots will do a better job surfacing quality content and avoiding problematic content than humans alone. Bots can look for statistical correlations. Bots can learn from the block chain and apply AI algorithms to predict what people will find valuable. Bots can more easily avoid voting for people who repost the same content repeatedly or employ other forms of plagiarism. Bots can guarantee that no post is voided simply because no one happened to click on the link.
Lastly, there's the ethical question of rewarding people for the value that they put into the system. Up-voting provides information to the rest of the users. I think it's good to compensate the people who do it.