Upvote bots and the development of steem

I hear a lot about the heajin flag wars, targeting self-voting abuse. On this the steem white paper says:

The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
whitepaper(page 15)

This is exactly what is happening and I dont think there is a huge problem. The community has the tools to effectively self-regulate and this is really a responsibility of the whales (see also my previous on this post)

Today I talk about a form of abuse that I think is much more serious and not nearly as lively discussed; the problem of upvoting bots.

The key issue is the same. Users are using their vp not to promote content they like, but act purely in self-interest. This is the case for heajin using 100% of his vp to self-upvote and voting bots using 100% of their vp on content they dont even read.

Whenever I hear negative comments about upvote bots these are directed to their users. But the users are not acting in a harmful way. They are just finding a way to satisfy their legitimate interest in promotion of their posts. They are also not making the money or abusing their vp. Strong competition for the vp of upvote bots make it such that all the profit is going to the operator (and this makes sense as they are the ones that control the vp).

So the people that are acting in a harmful way are the ones that operate the bots. They misuse their vp for money, they make the profit. There really is no big difference between them and heajin. In fact heajin is at least producing some content. I am not a big fan of these types of analysis, but he does seem to have some legitimate follower base.

It is an illusion that by down-voting the content of the bot-users we could effectively police the bots (at least as long as the down-voting vp is smaller than the combined bot vp). The bot-owner already made his profit as they are paid directly in sbd and the real harm is done to the user.

Also telling people to not use upvote bots is no solution. If most people stop using them, the ones that still do will have a increased incentive as they start to get some of the profits. It just means that people not caring about steem get more money.

source

We can hope that all the bot owners realise that their actions are hurting steem, but again the few remaining ones will make more money. The philosophy of steem is the above cited "crab in the bucket" idea. Misuse will happen, but we need to give the community the tools to prevent this misuse. In the case of self-vote abuse we have these tools (flagging and down-voting content). In the case up paid voting abuse I dont see these tools.

The problem is that the money is directly paid to the bot-operator and there is no community control on this. The bots also make some money from curation. By down-voting the users that curation can be minimised, but that is not an effective tool and hurts ordinary users harming the growth of the network.

I think what we need is negative vp leasing. If people can use part of their vp to reduce the vp of the bot owners, that would give the required tools to the community. If we fix a minimum amount of 15 steem vp remaining for each account, it cannot be misused for censorship. This is really the analogue of down-voting heajins posts, just for upvote bots. Without this option I think that upvote bots are a major detriment to the long term success of steem as they are much more harmful than the very obvious self-voting abuse.

What are your ideas? Are upvote bots a problem at all? How can the community control them and make sure that vp is used in a positive way? Why is there no huge outrage about the operators as is the case for heajin? Very interested to hear your opinions as this is a topic I only recently stumbled into and can still learn a lot.