I wonder if bots went away, if anything would be different?
Bots simply vote on things that other participants vote on, just faster. If we eliminated bots, some group of top authors would emerge, and people would compete on trying to time the vote perfectly, just like bots do now.
Some bots vote on things that other users vote on, other bots have a "curation list" which they read from. If we eliminated bots, curation would be limited to what humans can achieve manually, which would be substantially different. You'd probably see a lot more "real" curators in the list.