Are you referring to tokens like SORT and BRO? Where you buy the tokens and they either give you an upvote or pay you a dividend in tokens.
BRO has been around for ages. Surely these types of tokens evolved precisely because bid bots died on Hive. (That kind of business moved to layer 2 instead of Steem, and their value is they trap Hive on hive-engine).
First time I'm hearing of SORT but BRO has generally a good reputation and I hope it's not just upvotes based on who holds it/who sends them bro tokens in exchange for a vote.
In general starting projects that rely on layer 1 curation but gamified in a way to make detection of direct vote selling harder should really not be encouraged. Many go to these projects because they want the APR but if both the author and project profit off of it, you gotta wonder who's losing out on it which generally is regular curation/rest of the stakeholders not participating in this.