If you put it this way I agree, but the biggest part of Steemians is not using a bot at all or delegating SP to a bot to vote for them.
That biggest part is that part who runs out of SP fast and has no way to engage to others.
Since I can only speak for myself. Without help you cannot make it here (and help means growing a bit more/enough SP to post and comment) and if people help you, you help them back.
I better not say how many comments I give a day and what the percentage of comments is. I have big doubts the bots are the reason. The real reason is it takes time. Time people don't have or like to invest in answering, perhaps in commenting if there is some left but only 5 -8 words.
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Either people are having conversations with one another, or it's not social media. When bots interact with people it's not social media, but gaming. If I wanted to play a game I would. I come here to talk to foks, and the possibilities Steem creates to do more than that has the potential to change the world.
Giving up that potential for any amount of money is not attractive to me. For the few pennies I earn here, it's a repulsive idea.
RC (resource credits) are a possible problem for accounts that haven't created a network, and back in 2017 when I started Steemit was delegating a nominal amount of Steem to enable new users to interact with abandon. By the time the policy of Steemit changed, I was supplied with enough SP to do without the delegation, but my experience today would be vastly different than it was then. I can sympathize with frustration over rc issues.
Delegation is a better cure for those issues than buying votes IMHO.
I agree it is not social media if people, no matter what the reason is, are not able/willing to communicate.
So the first question is: Why is the biggest part here? It cannot be because of the huge income they make, also not about the gaming effect which growing can be.
It might explain all these unused accounts too. It is also not about good content since shitty posts earn as good or even better.
I am surprised if I hear how many different sites people visit a day, all sites that "pay".
STEEM is already a fulltime job for me. 🤔
It does cost more as I earn but there are people who seem to live from it. If you are that far or high on the ladder being social is not needed anylonger?
It would be nice if delegation is an option again and if those who need it also find out how. Since that is a big issue too. No tips, advice to do what, use other tags, be be noticed, etc.
I think so many changes in a short tine are not positive plus those who make a new account should see a list of what is needed to post, comment, how to buy steem, most used tags, if you need a delegation where to be, etc.
Like everywhere there will be a group die hards who will survive this and the rest will leave.
BTW not all bots are bad dustsweeper is a good one that night help those who just started to grow.
What you see now is that upvoting a comment or someone if you have less voting power is a waste of your vote/steem plus the receiver has nothing from it.
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There are very few challenges that can only be solved one way. Dustsweeper is not the only way to meet the challenge of low VP voters. Since I am not here to collect tokens, it's not an issue for me personally, but since it affects the community it's an issue I consider relevant.
Voting bots are anathema to social media, and are compromising Steem's ability to capitalize on the immensely powerful business model social media. I am convinced presently that Steem has gone the wrong way in building it's business model by implementing extractive mechanisms and automated voting rather than decisively encouraging creators and curators to interact personally, and some market metrics strongly support my assessment.
User retention is terrible, and getting worse. Steem price is continually falling, worse than other alts, and since I've been here Steem has fallen ~50 places on Coinmarketcap, indicating that despite being one of few tokens in the social media sphere, it's business operations are so poor as to perform worse than tokens that have no such use case. Again, social media has proved the most profitable of business models in fiat markets, and Steem is really screwing the pooch to do social media so poorly as to underperform tokens that don't even have a business model, like Dogecoin.
Upvotes have other value besides financial, and this is why they are featured on many social media sites that have no financial aspect attached to voting. Steem is encouraging only looking at votes financially, and this is demonstrative of the general bad business model it's undertaking.
Society is far more valuable than it's economy, or we'd all be pimping out our mothers. I'm not going to pimp anything, particularly my integrity, for economic reasons. Steem should be able to grasp these facts by now, and I expect it has. HF21 indicates that they are making these problems worse, and that indicates to me Steem may have a short future ahead.
You may not think it's reasonable to seek to kill a business in order to profit, but it happens all the time in fiat markets. KK&R, Bain Capital, and others disassemble companies as a business model, and make money doing so. None of the Steem in existence today came about through investment. All of it was mined, and most of it remains in the possession of those that mined it. If the ninjaminers wanted to create capital gains they would distribute Steem far more broadly, rather than effect code that increasingly concentrates it back into their wallets by exploiting stake weighting to extract rewards, but they don't. Basically, they sell it to new users, and then get it back as rewards through stake weighting.
It's possible to interpret that failure in more than one way, but I've had a lot of conversations with those folks, and presently I have no confidence that any of them actually desire to produce capital gains, which could be immensely profitable. More than that I cannot say with confidence.
Social media is being crushed with censorship everywhere we look today, and that includes Steem. A fortnite ago 8chan was shut down. Endchan nearly so today, and also today 4chan suffered a temporary outage. Free speech is a warzone, and big money is determined to destroy it. I do not have enough digits to count the number of accounts that are presently being completely censored on Steem, so there is reason to suspect that censorship is an impetus to the harm being done Steem, as it is difficult to censor by design.
Folks are moving to Weku, Somee, and others. I don't want to migrate, but I am not in charge of where the community goes. When platforms die, their communities are scattered, and there is a good community here that I very much want to remain in contact with. Where they go, so will I.
Hope to see you there.