i disagree on your view though, a greedy approach is cultural but of course, can't be helped.
Why do you say you disagree if you say it can't be helped? ;)
Even if it were possible, wouldn't changing the "greedy" approach also go against the very essence of Steemit (getting paid for content creation/curation)?
Your bot did well and you see it as an argument that "reading is not profitable" I see it as a sign that lack of diversity and not enough whales upvotes are chocking steemit\s potential growth...the sooner we see more posts and different authors making trending the better.
Well yes! I hope, for the sake of this platform, that this bot issue will get better, otherwise there's just no point in manually curating/reading content. I think the diversity is there, tit's just not on those vote bots' authors list. There's really no reason for the problem to disappear. From an economic perspective, voting for someone who isn't on those lists is almost always a bad decision.
This means that the relative rate at which authors are added to those bot lists is necessarily going to be less than user growth/content creation. So the problem may appear like it's getting better, while actually getting worse. Scary thought!
interesting insight, man. I wouldn't have thought of that but I see the point! Looking forward to reading your stuff, you have quirky and original way of thinking.