There is no chain that doesn't have bots. Bots work on every form of Crypto. So by your statement it will likely always be a sidechain, but then so will all others.
As you can't make bots impossible.
If a human can follow instructions to do something on a computer, a bot can be made to follow those same instructions.
EDIT: Flags though could be removed. But then consider those with power could create an up vote network of ONLY their stuff and keep building up and increasingly funnel the pool to their accounts. Right now the only thing that CAN counter that if and when it happens is flagging. That was the problem Dan Larimer and I were talking about when he finally convinced me that the flag needs to stay as it is currently the only stop gap to other forms of exploitation. The problem is that this doesn't prevent people from abusing the flag. Since it is decentralized there is no central authority that acts as policemen. The idealistic approach here was that the community would police such things. Though human nature and the way power is handled on the chain quickly subverts and corrupts that idea.
I was an advocate for removing the flag. Until I started imagining ways I could exploit the system if I was a scumbag if the flag wasn't there.
To truly address it you would need some sort of governance. Yet we have the old human nature problem of how do you keep the governance from becoming corrupt.
A lot of issues we have not even solved outside of the blockchain.
Though making bots impossible. No one has solved that anywhere. Captchas and Recaptchas can make them much more difficult to write, but that only works currently on centralized services with a front end people MUST go through. If you have a chain with an APIs and other means of accessing it to facilitate many things that have nothing to do with a front end then making bots is much easier. Someone could try to put something like captchas or recaptchas into the blockchain itself but that would result in slowing the chain down to the pace of a slug.
The truth is bots are interacting with every chain. Just most chains are not carrying social media data that people subjectively upvote/downvote.
Personally I'd like there to be no DOWNVOTE/FLAG for content. I'd like it only to exist for policing fraud, abuse, etc.
Yet without some centralized governance who decides what is fraud, and what is abuse?
from what you say the future of steem is looking bleaker every day.
Not only steem. This is a problem we still are fighting with in our realities outside of steem. It is why all the idealistic and nice sounding ideas tend to only work for a short term before they are corrupted.
Many humans love to game systems.
We haven't come up with a sure fire way of addressing these things outside of computers. Things move a lot faster on computers, so what we see happening at a slower pace outside of computers simply happens much faster inside them. It does make it more apparent. Yet it also can drown us with how much of it we see.
It is why I don't claim to think anarcho-capitalism is feasible right now. While it is the most beautiful idea for a future (Utopia) that I currently know of, it is also not realistic because of these things in human nature.
The only answer to that is education, I mean true education, critical thinking, morality, ethics, etc. Yet, it is clear that those calling the shots on education want none of that.
Something like Steem with a central authority that polices it would likely work for awhile. At least until that central authority was corrupted like every other central authority I am aware of.
Here is an example:
A new product like steem is launched with a statement that we will NEVER down vote your content due to the topic of the content or your opinions.
Allow people to FLAG (without monetary, or visibility effect) and those flags would accumulate. A central authority would then be able to look for fraud, abuse, plagiarism and the flags would be like a priority queue to help them identify such things.
Now how they deal with that. Should they have the ability to remove such posts? Should there be a reputation system where confirming such activities begins to penalize accounts with a bad reputation some how?
Such a thing could work for awhile. Then the old "who polices the policemen" issue arises.
We haven't even solved that outside of computers.
So "doomed to fail". That is hard to say "doomed to be corrupted" is likely always true. The question how long does it take for that to happen, and do you happen to be able to operate there and enjoy it before it is corrupted?
There is no 2nd amendment for the chain. Yet we can choose to LEAVE. If we have the means we can choose to try to create a competing environment. Eventually that is likely to be corrupted as well.
It would be nice to be able to stop that. If we could do that we could actually solve most of the world's problems.