I also put out a design for a feature that the Steempeak team were thinking of creating - I'm not sure I've seen that they have though. The idea is to give each user a 'voter mute' list, so that we can all create custom trending lists that remove the effects of specific upvoters. So if there are upvoters who continually annoy us, we can just remove them from our experience. I think that's a pretty empowering feature in general, but it also has the effect of minimising the power of the more visible bidbots since people can easily stop their effectiveness on a personal level. It's not perfect, but I think it would have a similar or even bigger effect than free downvotes if widely adopted.

I'm all about empowerment rather than control of others. We have the ability to empower, but don't seem to be using it in a fully imaginative way yet. All that said, I just realised that I now run a Steem powered site at ureka.org - which I didn't when I first though of this idea.. So maybe I'll integrate it in there and see how it works out :)