I agree with you that the whole bid-bot phenomenon is short sighted and damages Steemit's ability to become a major blogging platform which would ultimately increase the value of Steem and solidify its value as a coin. This is short term gain over long term wealth creation mentality.

I, like @valued-customer, am more interested in reading and producing quality and controversy than I am with playing this game to win. I have been following @taraz who gives lots of lip service to getting rid of the bot influence to keep the influence high but he has worked very hard networking and posting, borrowing SP and upvoting his own posts and it is paying off for him. In other words, he's playing this game to the best of his ability while adhering to his particular morality, though I don't read most of his posts since, to me, they are a bit superficial.

Another person I follow is @vimukthi. This guy is brilliant and is playing to win. He is doing very well and is providing interesting and thoughtful content. I believe he has SP parked in an separate account that he uses to upvote his posts and, as we all know, the more SP one has the more curator fishies will be following you and upvoting your posts. @vimukthi is using the rules to his best advantage while also providing quality.

My bottom line is that this is a game that can be played to win in the short term if gaming interests you. I'm not much into that. I just want to write. I want to invest my time, have people read my stuff and have the coin value go through the roof. I don't need much to live, but if Steem hit $1000, I already have enough Steem to last the rest of my life. I'd rather this platform stabilized and it's coin gain value.

The attrition rate on Steemit is large. Most of the people who joined when I did in September no longer post because $1-$5 for a couple hours of your time just isn't worth it. If somebody comes up with a better algorithm that increases exposure and then rewards authors for quality, I'll also jump ship. Until then I'm willing to support those who favor people over robots. Perhaps we can steer this ocean liner away from the iceberg before it's too late.