You're absolutely right! Auto upvoting does game the system even to the point where manually upvoting a post earlier than 30 minutes earns lower rewards because of the "bot penalty" applied which deters users knowing about this from voting amazing posts up early while often the very best posts either go unnoticed or get upvoted first by a bot network which then takes the majority of the earnings on curation while those discovering the post for the first time get little. I had the same debate and in order to promote change I am taking the "let's make it so bad we have to change it" approach because this seems to be what many of us respond to in our lives. Perhaps this post will contribute to helping us find ways to minimize bot upvoting in future updates without having to let it get much worse!
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making it so bad that it must be change is the wrong attitude. Human beings will do everything to optimize. bot voting is optimization at its best. Optimization does not care about intent, or whats wrong or right. So you have to first think about how you want the best version to behave. It would be such that people's vote needs to be genuinely based on the content. The only way to do that would be to require that people scroll down the entire thing before they are allowed to vote. People will try to optimize this routine as well by creating code that does this automatically. But at least it slows down the time allowing real readers to get a chance to get in line. but then that detracts from the users of feeling freedom to vote however they wish, so perhaps you allow people to vote from the homepage, but that vote is worth less.