I'm upvoting this despite my disagreement with the use of vote buying bots. What I will say though is that something very similar could be great for steem if the stake holders here were to recognise the real value of having payouts determined by real engaged people rather than arbitrarily or by programmed bots.

Here's what I would love to see and users of these vote buying bots could still benefit if we completely lose them.

I'd like to see steemit inc @ned @sneak (and any others who have them enabled) disable notifications for transactions to the wallets.

Then I would like to see an app or feature developed (doesn't have to be steemit) that notifies users of transfers to their wallets when the amount is above an amount specified by the receiver.

I could set my minimum to $1 so that I only receive notification of transfers when they are above $1. I would not set up automation as I believe when people receive automated support they sometimes slack off which was something I noticed demotivated me back when I was supported by the steem guild. This $1 would be paying for my ATTENTION. And this is what whales could sell instead.

I would advise setting the minimum higher if they can't read the amount of links they receive and to not withhold their votes only for people willing to pay if they want the userbase to continue to grow. The requirement to compete with vote buyers or attention buyers will completely turn off new users and old.