If artists don't get rewarded for what they do, they have to spend hours and hours doing other things just to survive.
This is a problem both on and off Steemit. Part of the problem is artists believing good art is, or should be, enough.
Good marketing isn't using money to get in front of the most people. Good marketing is figuring out who the right people are, why they want to buy your art, and how to present it so the right people will see it and see something they want.
What we have here with bots isn't marketing, cause there is no way to discern who is seeing the message. And many of the automated votes come from non-human accounts with steem automatically delegated to them as new "members". Delegated from whom? All those artists. You, and me.
This is long but if you'd like to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...
Believe me @wholeself-in, it is a problem I know quite well having been a self supporting artist for the last 30 years. Finding your audience is what it is all about. At some point you need to extend your audience, having sold work to all your current clients. Now steemit should be good for that, right? Actually the bots have brought my work to the attention of some like-minded individuals who would never have found me otherwise. I feel like everybody is ready to criticize, but no solutions are forthcoming. I am not computer savvy and my creativity is not in that area. So maybe we can appeal to people who have those abilities to create tools to diffuse the right information to the right people.