Another thing is this....
I noticed a user commenting on one of my posts the other day. He automatically up-voted himself as did 6 other users, simultaneously. Now, I watched this go down in a few seconds. So, these other 6 users could not have been real people, but bots.
Bots on Steemit will ruin what we have going here. There has to be a policy to stop this kind of thing fast, as people are taking advantage of the payout system, and will exploit it in any way in which they can...
The comments section I am quickly leaning back to an old idea that was shot down by the community of having two reward pools. One for posts, and one of a smaller amount for comments. Then there would be a sort of firewall so that yes the comment pool could be drained, but it would not kill the posting pool in the process.
This is not really a solution but a stop gap. Yet, I'm thinking revisiting that idea might be worth doing.
How? I can't think of a way. Turing tests wn't work, and any centralizing solution is worse than bots.
How about making bots worthless for that purpose by delinking VP from SP? It's the only way I can think of, and also fixes the gamut of financial manipulations at the same time.