I'm not a bot, or am I? Hmm. Your post got me thinking.
It seems to me that the world has more content consumers than content creators. That's why we have cable networks and programs to pump content to consumers, who pay for the content they consume.
Steemit doesn't require you to pay to consume content. Upvotes don't cost anything but time and attention.
Why don't we make it more rewarding to consume content on Steemit, rather than to just to create content? If people got rewarded more to read and upvote posts, they would stay on the platform longer even if they are not creators of content. Retention would be improved and curation teams would not be necessary.
Those who do create good content would not need a whale vote to earn rewards if the minnows vote had more weight. And those who only read and upvote posts would have more than a .0001 Steem reward incentive to do so.
As for bots, CAPTCHA works quite well already. If an upvoter only user of Steemit could earn more by interacting with the content they consume, they would come and stay and tell their friends and as soon as they saw real cash in their friends hands, their friends would join. Any thought?