Nice presentation!
You know I'm not a fan of bidbots Matt @yabapmatt so now that you're presentation is shared by my buddy from the uni I have to to comment it in any case :-)
With regards to bidbots what I still miss on Steem is a clear differentiation between content and advertisement. On any other platform in the world ads need to be clearly marked as such, except on steemit.com. So that's something that has to be fixed quickly in the design of the User Interface.
I agree that paying for votes is an opportunity for content creators to make their posts more visible, but it's actually against the original vision of Steem according to that value is given to those who create value.
With votes being for sale, value is given to those who have the largest stakes, thus money will be kept in hands of very few. That's why these vote trading services won't contribute to effective growth in the long run.
Also there is a lack of control with regards to spam and copyright abuse. We talked about that already, Matt. @minnowbooster recently published a good strategy in that context, also @themarkymark is doing much efforts to reduce abuse. @steemcleaners can't assume the responsibility for any type of abuse on this platform, and we're all in charge to check the content we're upvoting - even if a bot is doing it on our behalf, and especially if our votes are able to boost content to the trending page where it's gonna be visible to thousands of users.
I'd love to see much more projects like @curie and @communitycoin for instance. They really help to promote quality and make content a priority of Steem. It seems that SMT Oracles will also contribute to that aim, that's at least what I get from Ned Scott's latest statements.
Promoting high quality content and using it as store sign for the Steem blockchain will be the only way to make the brand Steem become valuable in the space of decentralized content distribution.
That's at least my unimportant opinion about it :-)