I think Vote buying has more cons then pros.
Pros:
Give an unknown author a boost and jumpstart their articles because they lack the influence in the community.
Cons:
Some voting bots are controlled by people who use the Voting-bots power after curating from "bought votes" to flag articles that they don't like.
Then there is another con job where a Voting-Bot developed enough trust from the community just to trick people in buying higher premium votes AND cashed out on the SBD.
Voting-bots votes are fake. So articles being upvoted are NOT really good articles but paid for to upvote.
We are better off without Voting-bots IMO. The solution is to have more curators. Then there is gentleman known as @Fulltimegeek that is actually designating his Steem Powers to curators to support the community effort to upvote good articles.
Ok so if all these concerns listed were addressed (i.e
i) they are not bot controlled to begin with,
ii) no flagging of articles is involved
iii) no con job :)
iv) only good articles are upvoted as there are actual humans who read these posts and vote only those that pass a certain standard,
but you were still required to pay for the "service", would it make it any better or more of the same?
It would make it better