Yes here they are: https://www.narrative.network/
And I say play ball on a fork, why the heck not. I setup and ran a forum for a time that just provided rewards based on activity - amazing how things change when real money gets involved. If the mobile gaming industry is able to prevent bot abuse then why not anything else? I think anything is possible.
As we like to have everything decentralized, you can see why central authority exists in many cases. If they accumulate enough power, the wolves can run rampant and destroy the ecosystem.
The problem with bots on steemit is that they provide the API open source for third parties to develop apps for. That isn't to say we cannot make running bots more difficult with purely changing code but it can be very difficult to distinguish from honest human interaction and something being done by an app (as there is busy.org which also uses the steem blockchain along with some other sites). I mean even then you could simply write a python client that interacts with html elements directly and its, I have to say that it is easier making a bot for web applications than it is on mobile phones, though still not impossible.