D is for Decentralized.
The platform will look exactly in a way YOU make it.
You said in the comment that's because of "whales simply upvoting themselves".
I'm not a whale, I don't even post much, and I've never used a bid bot... (and just recently I flagged few cases of excessive bid bot usage with my negligible SP) but the reality is not that simple as you are saying.
Look at your own voting example: ( 65.96 % self, 47 upvotes, 13 accounts, last 7d ) (source: steemworld.org). Saying that "others do that" is a really bad excuse. Especially that deeds on the blockchain stays forever.
And yes, you are right, there are no evil tools, it all depends on how you use them, that includes various paid voting services (actually calling it "bidbots" is very unprecise, as that's just a subset)
I think that the best alternative for voting bots when it comes to content visibility is a cooperation of a professional and honest manual curators and high staked investors powered by some ways of automation like curation trails on steroids.
That, plus maybe changing author reward split from 75%/25% to something towards 60%/40% or even 50%/50% can in a long run make original, high quality contnet stand out from the crowd and improve the platform.
Low quality content on a trending page makes us look silly.
If we say to the world (through the trending page) that some garbage is worth 1000 STEEM on our platform, then how much they can value STEEM? What profit you will make earning 1000 STEEM if STEEM itself would be worthless?
Also @baah is making a fair point with highly undervalued PROMOTED feature, which needs some more love.
I think 50/50 split would be a great experiment, but this idea has been already discussed for some time and based on my observation, a majority of users like it (dunno if a majority of stake tho).
So I have a question - when should we expect this change? I assume it requires a hard fork (correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe HF20 would be a good fit?
Yes, it's not a new idea, however I'm not sure if that can get into HF20 (I would rather want to keep that separate from other changes), especially if that would mean delaying HF20 even more.
Would it really be that hard to have 50/50 split like you said and a SBD/SP payout option for curators that mirrored author rewards... would be cool to see that option.