Let's keep it real, this is the first time you are commenting under a post of mine.

Actually, it is not. Once upon a time, I commented and won a cat meme contest you hosted. It was way back but I guess I have pretty good memory. ;)

what other option is there else than buying upvotes?

If the project has value, people ought to vote on it without being paid to do so. Ideally, Steem would get back to manually curation and you would get those votes. But the greedy assholes have made it so that you feel compelled to pay for what they should be doing already.

It's fucked but I understand the plight. I've had the idea of creating a front end that filters out content with paid votes and individuals that excessively self vote. I think @emrebeyler just might beat me to it.

It's tempting to pay for votes for my anti-abuse projects because accounts need more rep to be able to effectively deal with high rep abuser but just can't do it man.