That was the best post which I read this month. Topic which you described is really difficult, but still you explained it in very elegant way. You have talent for that, and now you have new follower ;)
Lately I spent some time on think about problems of auto-upvotes (my last non-profit post also mentioning about that). I believe that auto-upvotes are another really big problem on steemit. I am really curious, what you think about them.
I started to think, that so many auto-upvotes appeared on the platform mostly because of the rewards for voting. Without those rewards, the incentive to auto-upvote would came only from people which want to support particular kind of content. Right now, we have additional problem, that people also upvotes posts just because other people are doing the same.. so wrong decisions are auto-propagate even further, because then those posts are highlighted and can gather even more attention.
In my opinion, system like steemit with a lot of autoupvotes and very small user-retention at some point can will stuck with certain amount of people which will be constantly auto-upvoted by people which are no longer on the platform (BTW actually only downvotes can help to certain point). I believe this is a question from area of game theory.