completely agree with you, and I think applying soft pressure like this is a good way forward. What would be much better is taking away profit from the people operating the bidbots. But since they are paid directly in SBD this is not possible. I have argued before that we would really need negative SP delegation to remove SP from the bidbots.
As long as there are people operating the bots some will buy. By punishing the users, we are just making it more of a high risk high reward and some people will take that. I think we need to target the ones that get most of the rewards and that are the operators, not the users.
How do you target them? Is the negative delegation your solution? What's that? Like a flag?
The idea is that you can reduce the sp of bidbots by a negative delegation. It probably should not be possible to go below 15 sp to not make this to abusable. Instead of flagging a post this would be like flagging a person.
Then that bidbot would not be able to sell the vote anymore as the vote will not be worth much anymore.
Even better, when all the big guys work together and use a part of their sp to target the biggest bots, then the honest voting sp will have a much bigger impact. The reward pool will stay the same and is now distributed by all the honest curators.
I am not sure this would work out in practice, but it sounds like a good idea to have in addition to a flag also a negative delegation.