RE: The people casting votes are validating the value of that content
Amen, bro! Nowadays POB is about milking it all for what it's worth, which means selling, getting sold, so your money can work while you're trading your assets for other assets.
I actually see a new definition of POB around, which is slightly different, than the ideological one, and it's something like that: "Don't whine if you can't make it, and whales don't give a shit about you, they can do whatever the fuck they want with their money. INVEST! You don't have money to invest? Well, that's your problem".
Let's be realistic, steem blockchain allows for bots to thrive, it's the easy way out, and people always choose the easy way out! Banning bots is out of the question ATM.
I don't even wanna get into this argument anymore, cause it's a waste of time as any change to the blockchain demands consensus of 21 witnesses and they all profit from the bots, so they have no actual incentive for any change to happen.
Yes, the rise of bots started early, and just got worse over time... :/ I think Steem will have a fucking hard time growing into a real social content platform because it's largely run by investors, not content and community focused people.
Money people all the way. As someone said, it's not that something's wrong with code underneath the blockchain, we just have WRONG people pulling the strings and coming here to get rich in a month as advertised by Jerry!