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For financial gain only?

I think so, people chasing that "easy & fast" money.

Internet marketing in its early days was the wild west too, keyword stuffing pages & the like. Eventually it settled down. Even if it doesn't and the bots drive people away, once the audience (and the opportunity) leave the bots will flow somewhere else, leaving Steemit to recover.

Yes, the financial gain aspect of Steemit could become a problem, been wondering about that in the past few weeks. Also look at the introduce yourself tag, over half are not introductions now as people became aware that introductions pay better.

I'm holding out hope that the free market aspect of Steemit will ultimately balance all of this out. Sooner or later, the spammers will realize that there's very little return for the effort they're putting in and move on. All it should take is for users to become more selective about what they choose to upvote and that will help starve the spammers & bots into looking for easier pickings.

I also can't help but think that corrections to the changes made in HF19 that led to a lot of this are already being worked on.

Someone also pointed out to me a while ago, Steemit is still in Beta testing.

They're working the bugs out.