I think it takes away from your message slightly to use a paid voting bot to upvote your content when you are talking about such a thing being a negative aspect.

I'm not entirely convinced that having automated bots that push content for X amount of votes is a great thing either.

Perhaps lowering the value of a vote if it is repeatedly directed towards the same user over and over again, obvious botnetting should be located and diminished in effectiveness, weighting a vote towards original content could also be a thing, but it is very hard to gauge effort put into a post especially if it contains video or audio, but you can certainly curate based on words.

A referral system is not advised considering that even just recently there was a huge bandwith issue and new/small users were not even able to interact with the platform, throwing more users at this would just make that problem worse.

Spreading the rewards from witnessing would be a great thing, even out to the top 200 or on a work completed basis or work capable basis, rewarding the witnesses with the most possible transactions per second and bandwith proportionally to one another, incentivizing growth of capability instead of just pushing more votes at it.

Dropping off nodes that are not updated over time, say if you don't update within a week the votes that are pushed towards you start to diminish in effectiveness and so over a duration you will naturally slide out of the paid area and into the unpaid one, this would incentivize maintaining your witness node.

Also a reward system in terms of people who constantly power up / do not withdraw get a higher weighted vote than people who withdraw constantly, supporting the platform should give you a bigger stake when interacting with it IMO.

I can't really thing of anything else right now, but thanks for sharing and I hope you found some of what I put here helpful. :)

Much love, many peaches. <3