Good questions... Honestly, I don't have a problem with bid bots, but frankly I'd like to see some risk involved. This involves actual risk of being downvoted from someone that simply disagrees that the post is worth the currently assigned value.
How is this value determined? Why just by comparative analysis. For example, there's some obvious outliers in value assignment just by looking at what's in the hot and trending section... ... Hum .. I just looked as of writing this and it seems to be a fairly difficult task. But for instance, one picture posts, and crazy high payouts come to mind.
There's an argument going around about people having high stake deserving to self vote their crap to however high they want, but this is flawed, for the reasons I hint at here. They deserve to be able to assign or whatever value they want, but the rest of us surely get a say in, "wow that's totally over valued".
I feel if more work was being done to value posts properly we would eventually hit an equilibrium of sorts.
So. Quality content? Determined by the "wisdom of the crowds". But perhaps the incentives in current form aren't enough. I also don't think we have the proper etiquette as a community yet. I wonder what would happen if everyone took one vote per day as a flag for whatever they felt was over valued (not shit they disagree with). Maybe it would make everything that much better? Maybe flags would turn into an everyday, accepted occurrence that is a form of feedback rather than political mudslinging.
you know, I probably didn't spend enough on bots for this post to get that risk factor... I also didn't get any assisting votes which I had hoped for :shrug: