Interesting narrative, I hadn't thought of that. Here's the clincher:

[...] people notice this post is already voted well above 25 cents and wonder why.

The hypothesis here is that post which are already highly valued are of greater interest. I think this could be correct but perhaps not.

In any case the bot (as it currently is configured) is only interested in comments. That's what I tried to say in the post, that I think there is broad agreement that high self vote payouts for comments is not beneficial to the platform.