The bots can turn into a real problem. One thing that people need to consider is that when someone like @dantheman talks about "quality content," they're referring to quality in terms of SEO characteristics of the post. It's not the same meaning of "quality" that we use for judging content based on artistic features, such as writing styles and emotions, or on whether the post was informative/useful.

These bots cannot make such determinations on quality. They are looking for things like links to other reputable sites, visual imagery, headers and other rich text, and even things like popular tags. Post length may also be considered. The problem with this type of search for "quality content" is that it largely rules out original artistic content. A bot isn't likely to find a very well-written and moving fictional story - but it will find that mundane and very common article that briefly talks about technical analysis on stock market trades, and has a couple of photos of charts and three links to different news sites or heavily traded corporations. That is what a bot can detect.

So, the question is whether or not the human whales (and even many of the dolphins) will correct those votes when they happen and reward others who are creating original/artistic content instead. There are ways that SteemIt can go about curating content for SEO purposes, but still reward those who are actually creative and offer valuable content other than for strictly SEO purposes. Both are valuable to a social platform, but right now, it seems that the former are being predominantly seen and rewarded. And as long as users have that perception, they will be discouraged from joining or staying to create content. It doesn't always have to do with money, either. It's about visibility - which they can get on other platforms much more easily than here, despite some of the claims that have been made.