I'm of the mind that in a perfect world there would be no paid upvotes. But if we can't reach a consensus on that, maybe the community can agree to some rules. Cap the amount of money these pay for play services can dish out? If we war game this out, its easy to see how upvote bots would spread like cancer. First, the bad actors use the upvote bots, then quality content creators use them just to keep up. I would suggest the witnesses come up with a "certification process" (with a certification logo and all). Bots that cap a paid upvote at say $10.00 (or whatever concensus number) and have some mechamism to seek out quality content are "certified" by the witnesses (with a certification logo so we know). And bots that are upvoting insane amounts of money and have quality curation methodology are flagged and hopefully destroyed. But then again, it would probably be really difficult to reach a consensus on rules. But I'm just trying to throw out ideas to reach a conclusion. I see Steemit as the future for webcomics and the health of Steemit is my top priority so I'm just trying to get a dialogue going on this.