Bots are what I see as the biggest impediment to Steemit's continued growth. Currently there is nothing stopping a person from creating a horde of bots that do nothing more than upvote and/or flag posts for any reason the author fancies. Goat posts, all posts by people named Bill, anything pro-hate speech, sure why not.
Most of the arguments I've seen about the site often revolve around bots but seem to assume bots are forever, so we need to combat with bots or flag abusers.
Bots can be useful to monitor for community violations or plagiarism, finding posts of interest to the author and many other things. But, they should never be allowed to vote or flag. There is no way they could know if a post is art or gibberish keyworded like a 1990's Google dump site.
Steemians need to get a handle on the bots if we want new people to feel valued and welcome. Whales are the natural evolution of the steemit culture and are not the problem. Bots, on the other hand pervert the culture and make it hard for humans to get a foothold on steemit.
Thank you for this great comment, I totally agree with you on pretty much every point.
Bots can be useful, but pay for vote bots are going to turn steemit into a place full of sloppy content and no reel value.
The more you pay the more you can earn, regardless of how good your content is.
I'm just going to keep doing my thing and hope people eventually see the downside of it.