There is a big question for a bot designer though - are you going to design a bot that votes for content that raises the value of STEEM, or are you going to write one that maximizes your personal profits. Are they one and the same? If not, does that point to there being a problem?

If the big human curators (who honestly control most of the author reward distribution) were voting for content that raises the value of steem, then these two designs would be one in the same.

Bots predict whale behavior. Period. And theyre pretty good at it. If bots are making bad curation decisions, they are learning how to do so from watching the whales upvote the same garbage by the same authors every day (no its not all whales and no, its not always garbage).

Bots are not the reason for bad curation, they are a symptom.