I appreciate what you are trying to do here. There is certainly a lot of negativity, no doubt some coming from me, though I do try to make it funny too so as to balance things out. So it great to gear about what you have gained as a person from this platform.
But, as you asked, I have a lot to be grateful to Steemit for. So much in fact that I'm not going to try list them all here. However, what you and I have gained from Steemit will not be available to others out there to also gain if we do not keep raising awareness of these issues, and rallying steemians together to take a stand against them.
Things are getting very bad, and it is bewildering to me that no one can see what this vote-buying is doing the platform, and how the ubiquitous self-voting is only a side effect of the less organic voting from whales due to a portion of the rewards pool now being reserved for people who will pay for it.
Obviously, the whales who are doing this are happy. They are getting their curation rewards still, as they always have been. Only, those curation rewards shouldn't be called curation rewards anymore, because what they're doing is not really fucking curating. All they are doing is selling a rewards pool, and getting a bonus for doing so. Now there is much less authors getting whale votes because they won't use the bots or can't afford to, so it is no wonder that so many people have started upvoting their own shit, and spamming everywhere trying to make pennies, when the daily rewards pool is no longer fair game for anyone who can create a decent bit of content.
Again, I do appreciate what you are doing here. But I really do not think that we should let the ball slip on this one. As long as this continues, the steem ecoysytem will continue to become more and more centralized, So, there's some beautiful poetry in all these idiots digging their own graves, and paying for the privilege to do so.