I agree with you! at the majority, discontent is caused not by(with) the number of the earned reward and the fact that these upvotebots interfere with natural posts ranking by strengthening their current popularity, as they create the illusion of their exclusivity, upvaluing them in comparison with the others. Users begin to follow the authors, not even reading their posts, just hoping for further increase in value. It is human psychology.
I like this expression, but to me it seems like it's not really an illusion, but rather the true state of things at the moment.
A lot of the same authors are pushed to the trending page every day by whale bots, and even if their content is of acceptable quality, I'd much rather see 30 unknown authors' quality posts recieve $100 and some visibility each than the same whale-backed author receive $3000 every day.