degrading because the protocol doesn't prevent it.
The "idealized" intent was for people to "lead", yet everyone has different ideas and wants to just make money any way they can, and most don't agree on the actual direction for the platform.
The blockchain can't prevent bots, because it's a open access blockchain. A regular site can have closed DB so no one can API to it.
I'm pointing out how our actual supporters that value the content to upvote it, aren't so high. When tool outages happen we can see the effects. Will it change? No. It will probably increase. It's up to individuals to be influenced and change their behavior, that's how this will be halted.
I understand the point you were trying to make. The point I am trying to make as a crypto-veteran of 2011, is that any weakness with ability for profit will be exploited no matter what. Can it be stopped completely? No. Can it be mitigated? Absolutely. The fact is the idealists are a very small portion of any of these communities, even one as robust as Steem's. The majority of all of the user base in crypto is there for profit first and foremost, even if it means collapsing the system that provides it. One of the primary concepts of cryptocurrency that allows it to function well is trustless systems. That means the protocol needs to redirect greed in a productive way and protect the system from its destructive effects. If this is not done it is just a matter of time before it fails.
What do you suggest can be done on the blockchain level to prevent or redirect it as you say?
I would limit self voting payouts for one since it is seriously draining the payout pool. This will again reestablish the ability for people to earn more legitimate payouts. People will still use socks and voting bots to self vote but this requires more effort and potentially more content creation to support those accounts. It won't stop self voting but will at least raise the barrier of difficulty.
Increase the depletion of voting power for comments. A lot of the abuse is being funneled thru comments, and they require comparatively little effort compared to posts. If people still find comments very useful they can still vote for them but they will do so more selectively, and this will also make it more difficult to funnel money out of the payout pool to ones own accounts, and leave more for people creating the main content.
A scaling increased voting power cost could be implemented for voting for the same user from the same account multiple times within a set period of time. This would increase the burden of using bot voting significantly, reduce self voting, and force users to diversify their votes in order to earn curation rewards.
A reduced cost of voting power for voting for accounts you have never voted for would encourage people to find and vote for posters they never voted for before encouraging more distribution of votes.
An account stats page that displays the centralization of a users voting patters to allow users to easily see who is voting for the same users over and over again. This could be done by a 3rd party. I have seen some users compile lists like this manually. Public shaming of such activity and making them more visible so users can take action would be useful.
Some kind of balancing system that would reduce the reputation of a user if they continually voted for the same users over and over without voting for other users they vote on less. In essence every time they vote for user A without voting for users B-Z, it would start reducing their rep. The same could also be applied to voting power rather than reputation.
Create an alternative vote that would be the same in all ways except without a payout, and costing less voting power. This would incentivize users to upvote content they like to increase its visibility rather than to produce a payout for either party. This would free up more funds to be distributed in the voting pool. I think a lot of users here would be happy with just having their content read even if it didn't pay much, but it is hard to get noticed being drown out by all the auto voted content.
Anyways this isn't an easy problem to solve, and none of my suggestions are fool proof but simply ideas to raise the barriers of difficulty for autovoting and self voting via proxies. Nonetheless you get the idea of what I am suggesting with this list, a protocol enforced system of incentivizing organic voting over bot voting or self voting by creating a cost to those voting patterns.
Great suggestions. Thanks!