When the authors that got votes from bots started abusing the power, the rest of community will likely stand out and start flagging, and it will ruin the author's rep. Given that we'll have 7 days to review, it's easier for the "good people" to react. I don't think a wise author will do so, unless she/he need quick money, or the account is compromised.
By the way, it's up to the bots to implement better voting algorithms. Most bots are voting for money, they have incentives to not vote for contents that will be mass-flagged.
With the cultural stigma of the downvote this kind of abuse hasn't been discouraged even with efforts from a minority. Your votes and Dans were the only ones that mattered and they were countered by other whales to keep the rewards high despite the abuse. I'm not sure those same whales will turn a new leaf if somebody like @ozchartart went from posting 4 times daily to 10+ times daily.
That you and others disagree and your point of view doesn't happen to prevail in one instance doesn't mean the system doesn't work. It works when stakeholders actually agree on what constitutes abuse. There is no objective definition.
That said, it also works to an extent even when there is disagreement, in the sense that incentives favor choosing content to upvote that won't be downvoted at all, whether or not the downvoters succeed in driving the post value all the way down to zero.
I will agree with you there. The risk of wasting voting power wouldn't be worth it when seeking ROI, particularly from curation, which is already not that high for most users.
The question is - what can be done when the abusers are actually the larger stakeholders, as was the case a few months back? The other large stakeholders mostly took no action. So, if there is no reaction and other stakeholders don't have enough power to make a difference, the abuse goes on unabated. I don't know what the solution would be, but having the post reward limits/penalties would at least be able to curb that.
What other back-end options do you think there could be that could address abuse vs. unwillingness/ineffectiveness to mitigate it on the front-end?
I would say the same stake-holders are still "pod voting" The accounts change, but the behavior doesn't. No changes to the system will stop a few accounts that vote for a handful of accounts each day.
Maybe the builders of the bots can build a feature where they can vote on some of their fav. accounts on odd days, and different accounts on even days.
Downvote, and it is still effective in shifting the incentives even if you aren't a larger stakeholder.
Consider a whale who has a choice of where to deploy one of his or her valuable and scarce 40 (full) votes per day. Choice A will get downvoted and Choice B will not. The incentives then favor B.
Unfortunately this isn't an instant gratification solution, but because it takes time for incentives like this to work, but they do work.