One of the issues with blockchain projects like this is that improving on architecture-level changes is hard, if not impossible. On any non-blockchain platform, the answer would be "We need to get rid of the bots and the ability for you to pay bots to upvote for you." After all, this system turns steem from a content-creators-first platform to a have-money-to-make-money platform. However, how do you pull such a stunt on a blockchain project? You can't remove the ability for others to add to the blockchain. So instead someone has to care enough to run analysis on the data: find out who the bots are. But then what do you do with that information? How do you discipline actors in Steem? Do we have a mechanism for that? I don't think so.

This reminds me of the Civil project, in an interesting way. Civil is a journalism blockchain project. In addition to aiming for censorship-resistance through the use of blockchain, Civil uses a Constitution. Newsrooms on the Civil platform must abide by the constitution. Any citizen can accuse a Newsroom of violating the constitution by staking a certain amount of their CVL token. And then the community votes. That Newsroom can be kicked off the platform if they violate the constitution. This is an oversimplification of their approach, but my main point is this: our experiments in blockchain as a community have focused so far on the libertarian end of the spectrum. Expecting pure market forces to give us our desired outcomes. Perhaps it's time to start experimenting with democracy.