The common reply I get when I bring up this topic is as follows: "It's too hard to find all of the bots and stop them." And this mindset is what is going to kill Steemit.
The more that we let people continue to build bots and deplete the rewards pool with these schemes (which are predominantly run by whales by the way), the more that others are going to attempt to do the same thing. Because simply put, money talks.
At the end of the day, we live in a capitalist society (I can't tell you how many people have given this reason to me as the reason why bots are allowed and the pay for upvote schemes are legitimate) ...Ugh...
Steemit is about building a community. It's not about being a capitalist, or about bringing the faults of the "real world" into the blockchain.
We need to stop all of the dumb s%*t that's destroying Steemit before it gets out of hand (I don't think we're too late .. yet).
Hopefully enough people will realize that the number of new users is dropping, the number of active users is dropping, the amount of rewards that each post is receiving is dropping, the quality of content contributed within the community is dropping, .... and Steemit is dying. Hopefully enough people will realize this before it's too late and we're all able to still do something about it...