The third law of thermodynamics is wrong.
Kozyrev proved it. And dozens of people proved his proving because they wanted to disprove it very badly. (and failed)
Or, in other words, if there was only in an entropy negative direction, there would be tons of dead galaxies all around to see. When we look out, we see none. No dead galaxies. Entropy is not uni-directional.
Humans in all developed nations are slowly lowering populations. None of the developed world has births high enough for replacement.
There are all kinds of ways to limit bots, but the main way is by rewarding good content. But, that is not how steemit was designed. That was just a story, just a white paper pulled over the eyes of the users. When i first got here i commented loudly and often that what is coded is not what is in the white paper.
But, really, steem is doomed, but only like you said, from corruption. It was designed from the beginning to be corrupted. If you investigate the people who started this ... you end up with... people living on a boat in international waters off the coast of a non-extradition treaty country.
Fortunately, the future will show us many structures where humans work better together in. Basically, it is inbuilt rewarding of good behavior.
One of my favorites is ... the "steemit" you see is not the steemit everyone else sees. So, you follow a group of people, called your 'people' group, and only their votes count for what you see as good or flagged.
Limit. Yet you need to be able to detect them. It also does not make them impossible.