@ihashblox, I'm with you on that. I'm a bit of an IT generalist and have a few ideas about forking Steem to remove the overpowered bots and their primary sponsor, @freedom, who coincidentally has enormous influence as to who the top 20 witnesses are.

It's almost like a cycle of power and I don't see that changing. I think the only reasonable solution for the common man is to fork 'em off and build a new type of Steem. Starting point would be to reappropriate @freedom's stake to something that is actually beneficial to the platform. Currently, I see that account as an overgrown parasite that gets paid to sponsor selling votes and earn curation rewards from accounts that are not actually curating.

Anyways, I haven't really disclosed these ideas to too many and, it sounds crazy. There would be a lot of challenges as much has been built on Steem already but I think there is some potential in the idea. One of the prereqs would be to have a bot that is able to identify vote selling and have a mechanism to counter.