I agree with you that owners flagging their customers is crazy, I couldn't believe when I saw that happening recently. Way to get rid of customers yourself, but the honest way would be to just undo the deal.
The honest way to get votes is consistency and networking. Like on any other social media platform. Of course luck plays a role too.
Any kind of buying, be it with liquid steem or with delegation, is a form of abuse and shifts the playing field towards those who can afford that.
There are a lot of people fighting real abuse, and the amount of manual curation has risen too. We're not at a point where everything would be great yet, but we got a bit closer.
Regarding decentalization, in my view we could be a lot further with that if the big userbase understood earlier that paying middle men to boost their short term profits doesn't help, and the good way would be investing in their own SP instead. Every buy from a bot, every rented delegation, filled the pockets of a few who now have disproportionate power without having done anything for that.
It's far from being centralized, as different groups have different goals, but I too would wish for a much better distribution. Doing my part, as everyone else should see what they can do. Complaining about not being able to feed the giants any more is certainly not the way.
Well, from the other side - I noticed that this anti-bot groups have their own bots for downvoting. And this is? What? Normal? Decentralized?
And what about staking tokens? Just for example: I'm staking CCC tokens and get the value (CCC token) for my posts from the CCC tribe, regarding the my stake and some other parameters probably. But what they use for delegating the power (read CCC tokens)? Probably some alghorhitms...(read bots...).. and I'll be again downvoted from some maniac/psycho/ botmaybe?...
It's not that easy, I think this downvoting will give us very strange community and it's not the right direction for Steem ecosystem.
There's nothing to say against automation and bots in general. What's condemned are profit oriented vote sellers. They are called bid bots, and although only the second part of the term is used many times when talking about them for convenience, it's the first one which is the problem.