RE: Community Spirit? Engagement on Social Networks is 'King'. For Steem, This Means 'Proof of Brain' - Which is Currently Broken.
Bidbots are the symptom, not the cause of the problems.
Bidbots, and other upvoting schemes, are a consequence of the economic code encoded onto the blockchain that allows such transactions to be profitable without any consideration to any human aesthetics.
To target the effect rather than the underlying cause will never completely solve the problem.
As you say, the solutions currently being designed are to build on top of the blockchain's economy and construct user experiences that align with the original goals of "proof of brain".
However, these will all be built on the same foundation and will have to compete for rewards with those content-agnostic algorithms that will not go away on their own.
I repeat, the underlying economic code needs an upgrade to become more balanced.
The economic code is not sacrosanct, it needs fixing.
The code is designed on principles of anarcho capitalism, which means free trade - there is no easy way to facilitate these principles while also preventing bots at the blockchain level.. Besides which, it's not really possible to block bots at that level reliably.
The aim is not to block bots, that's looking at the effect, the aim is to make the underlying transactions less profitable.
This isn't "free trade", it is an encoded economic system; one is only free to do what is allowed.
The idea is to allow as much as possible - hence the 'anarcho' in anarcho capitalism.
What is your particular suggestion to make the transactions less profitable?
My suggestion is that we need a small team dedicated to looking at the economics of Steem, with the ability to stress-test ideas on a testnet and be entrusted to write some reports of all successes and failures.
The aim is to reduce the symmetric design of upvotes so that bilateral relationships are less predictable and hence less profitable. One example already exists on Steem: the curation algorithm and the reverse auction period. That island of activity is unpredictable yet perfectly algorithmic.
I agree that making alternate rule-sets available in test networks is needed - although history has shown that Steem's complexity can result in these test scenarios having difficulty generating realistic data, but it's still better than nothing.
I agree that effecting the way that voting benefits people such that dysfunctional voting is reduced would be a great thing - however, despite a huge amount of communication and thinking on this issue over the years, I haven't really seen any examples of how this can be done reliably and in a balanced way. In the absence of any workable solutions, I look instead at what is workable and hence I look at preventing the function of bidbots.
Curation, as interesting an idea as it is - doesn't actually stop the bidbot corruption of proof of brain because, for one, the curation rewards just go to the upvoter - which might be a bidbot - which still helps the bidbot operator to offer lower priced votes to customers. Higher curation rewards don't necessarily hurt bidbot operators.