Well, I have used bid bots again and again, too, because they are the only way currently to get traction.

However, part of the reason that they are the only way to make it to the trending page is because they exist and everyone else uses them.

Moreover, I would beg to differ, this proposal would rather help minnows with a small follower base instead of hurting them. If revoting is punished, much less of the reward pool is distributed among whales and voting circles that abuse the system. Hence, much more money will be paid to regular authors and payout is determined by content rather than by follower base or upvoting circles. Similarly, in order to obtain curation rewards you need to search for good content (simply automatically voting on your default go to author won't suffice anymore), again this benefits authors that write good content instead of people with a huge follower base.