The ever-changing bought-bot dominance on trending shows the problem is structural. It would be cheap for competitors to swamp Steemit with this sort of activity and crush it, since they can't buy a distributed platform. There's an assumption that all this post-promotion activity increases the value of Steem, but I can't see how that's true over the long-run. No one will be here looking, just posting onto a paid-post platform. Like all those bought Twitter follows and retweets, or the unmoderated G+ accounts. Wastelands.
Enjoy your break. And some fresh air! : )
It's not true. Some think this system is distributing the tokens, but they're not looking at the money the bots get. It's putting more tokens in fewer hands and it's painfully obvious. Those who are earning by selling the votes are shooting themselves in the foot. They're setting themselves up to fail because they don't understand how this entertainment industry works. That's painfully obvious as well. For the life of me, I can't figure out why they would do that to themselves. They stand to lose the most. I can't wrap my head around why this is so appealing.
I think bots really are a product of the system, most notably - the built in promotion feature not working.
As well as a content creation and curation platform, steemit is also a free-market, capitalist, self policing anarchy and people will just go down whatever route seems to be the best for them at the time. The idea being that if people don't like something enough - it'll be down-voted to oblivion, but somewhere along the way - low quality content apparently became more acceptable to the masses.