I am giving thought to your predicament. It may be better if we discuss further on Discord.
However, we must first establish your ultimate goal. If saving the forest is it, then you need to maximize profitability, even if that comes at the cost of you or your bots reputation or public perception.
I suggest nothing sinister or immoral, but both increasing the bot voting limits while also allowing self-voting would drastically open up the market of users who would send "donations" to the bot. You could still restrict self-voted comments. At the current RoI of your bot, you would be a great alternative when Randowhale is sleeping.
Delegations to improve the voting power of the bot will be very difficult without offering profit-sharing, which may ultimately be necessary. Unfortunately, it is tough to compete with better rates of return elsewhere on the morals of saving a forest on a continent your target market is only about 1/6th likely to live on.
I am continuing to think up concrete suggestions for you. We should discuss this further. I am always in the MSP / PAL Discord. We may be able to assist you further there beyond what I can do alone.
Thanks a lot for you points and advices. The goal is really to protect the forest.
Ad. selfvoting. Yes, I would ban selfvoting on comments, but allow selfvoting on post but only from users having less than 5000 SP? So it will be as minnow support.
Ad. delegations. I do not have much problems to offer profit-sharing, but how much? I am going to connect to discord.
Thanks again. I hope we will find out the best way for our conservation program. I still believe we could use steem to save the forest.