Whales are after profit, some people vote up content just to make money, but if others dont vote it up then they wont make optimal profits.

So eventually only the good qualiy content will get upvoted with most power. Bots or not, the free market has a very good mechanism to reward high quality stuff.

So if a person is greedy and wants to optimize his curation profit, he will either way have to upvote people who are popular.