would this be a candidate for DV'ing by consensus? It's definitely slippery.
Yes, we could approach this sort of thing a number of ways.
As I mentioned on Discord, the best approach is to contact the upvoter directly. Has anyone contacted @richardcrill to alert him to the fact that @littledisciples may be taking advantage of his auto-vote?
I have not looked closely at @littledisciples posting habits, but there is a natural tendency for an account-holder who gets put on a 'fan-list' by a whale, to start posting more and more frequently, often with less and less quality. Most 'whales' don't want their auto-votes taken advantage of like that and will remove the auto-vote for that account or greatly diminish future upvote percentages.
A community consensus protocol could also be created. There are a myriad of ways to go about that. For example, maybe we have a group of 5 POBLeus curators each grade the flagged post based on their assessment of 'level of effort' (and take the median value), then apply a 'community-derived' sliding scale (equating ascribed level of effort to maximum allowable reward). If the post is deemed to have been over-rewarded, then [1] disable additional upvoting via the front-end [2] send a message to the top voter and ask him/her to reduce their vote value for that post, [3] auto-downvote from the proofofbrainio account just before payout (if needed), to reduce the total reward down to the 'community-derived' amount.
That way, if the highest upvoter adjusts his/her vote before payout, the DV gets skipped and no other curators suffer the penalty of the DV.
Also, if it turns out that a specific upvoter is consistently over-rewarding posts and refuses to adjust his/her voting habits, then other curators can consciously avoid upvoting posts that are also upvoted by that 'rogue' curator. (A weekly report of DVs for over-rewarded posts would help with this). Leading to that rogue curator getting only his/her upvotes downvoted.
This is just one very-quickly-put-together example.
Again, there are a myriad of ways to address this, some more elegant than others, no doubt.