CAPTCHAs can be used to prevent bots but they are extremely annoying for humans.

When I registered on Steemit I was asked for my telephone number, for sms verification (just one time, not annoying).
So I suppose there are other ways to create accounts, without verification. I think that should be fixed.

However, I would prefer to suffer some captcha than having lot of bots messing up the site like now.

But you [whale] are forced to think in terms of what is best to do. There is financial pain in one's mistakes which creates a feedback mechanism to improve what you do.

This is true but I don't think this mechanism is working: Steem is cutting-edge blockchain technology, but price goes down and down (I could be wrong, I'm not trader nor crypto expert).

The big stakeholder of a magazine doesn't directly choose what is going in first page and what is not, it's not his job, even if he could do it with a phone call. That job is done by people paid to guess what is best to sell: its stakeholder interest, but stakeholder is not able to do it. In our case, this job could be done by people in a democratic way, not by whales (stakeholders) or bots (?!#!?).

I will try to write down some problems of this mechanism but it's really just guessing:

Top earnings posts are often nerd/crypto stuff, upvoted by nerd/crypto whales; this is a vicious circle because people who wanna earn money will post stuff based on whales tastes (actually doable because there are few whales), and interests as a Steem stakeholders.
In a popular network (with big human user base) a post about Bitcoin price or fee would never make this much views/likes/money.
Earning several thousand of dollars with a make-up tutorial (zero originality) in a Steem t-shirt is another example, it makes me think unfair.
From outside this money-game looks like a small circle.