Since the main approach seems to be to stop the draining of the reward pool by people using voting-bots for pure profit instead of getting visibility (the noble use-case for votebots in the eyes of many), upvoting the ones who don't use them is not helping the problem in any way.

Flagging those who use bid-bots solely to drain the reward pool will give money back into the reward pool. Rewarding others for not using the bots will not put money back it the reward pool - but even take more money out of it.

Rewarding others will also not stop the abusers! - Why would it? I won't stop robbing a bank just because the bank starts to give money to homeless who beg for it as well.

Of course it also takes way more brain-power to manually curate good content than to flag the use of abusive stuff following a simple but effective script. And it's also more fair - the script most likely works on a random basis - manual curation would be biased by Grumpie's personal opinion.

Summed up, I think the proposal to upvote others is completely useless for accomplishing what @grumpycat wants to accomplish. Giving away money to some non-criminals will also not stop thieves from stealing in the real world. Why would it?

In the end, upvoting others instead of flagging would even have the reverse effect since more people would be using the abuse-usable-services again if they don't fear the flaggs.