A common theme in a lot of the comments here is to look into ways to reduce to automatic voting on well known authors, when the quality of the author's post may not merit the upvote. By automatic voting, it may not be by a bot, it could just be as you indicate a knee-jerk upvote for an author you know to be popular. I think it's worth exploring ideas that have been presented for changing this behavior, but it's likely to be a more complex change than the relatively simple one I'm proposing (with some potential amendments based on input here). So I think it would be best to implement any such idea in a separate change at a later date. I'd prefer to not make too many changes at once, otherwise the effect of each change can get difficult to measure.