Yeap, I agree!

But, as it stands, vote-buying is being heavily abused, not by minnows who try to get good content seen, but by spamposts buying heavy votes for stolen meme's and plagiarized content.

Buying upvotes on post shortly before payout, making correctional downvotes impossible, is the best way to abuse this mechanism "safely". I think that's what @grumpycat is trying to get at, and I can see that making sense.

About the issue I've raised myself here initially, the skewed discovery due to paid-for-votes dominating the trending and hot sections... I wouldn't complain if those were usually quality posts.

Imho. Paid-Votes for ROI and increased visibility, that's fine for posts older than a day and younger than 4.

Oh and... have you looked into the functionality of "promoted"? Initially there was a concept of "buying" visibility that actually benefited the reward pool. Too bad it's so poorly implemented that greedy whales can just sell their votes to greedy spammers nowadays...

It's a complicated issue, and I find it exciting to see the community dealing with it. I am not against vote-selling, it's part of the game and I'll much rather have it done openly than under the counter by some big players. But I also support putting pressure on vote-sellers to do their business in a way that's not harmful to this ecosystem.