If promoted content is so good that it doesn't matter if it were promoted or not, you would have voted it up anyway – isn't that just good content? If anything, we should be forcing spammers to get that good at the whole process. Then they will actually be producing a useful product, and stop being spam.
Everybody wins!
I've been tinkering with filtering out the big/relevant bots from content searches, and I have some bad news – it doesn't really make any difference. Which probably violates expectation, but it's still true. The problem is that voting across the platform encourages humans to make decisions just like the bots do, because reward is focused on essentially predicting what everyone else is going to do rather than sending a signal of what you like.
Because everyone is trying to make a guess about what everyone else is going to do, there occurs a convergence of intent. It's not collusion because it's not premeditated, but emergently "everyone" has discovered that if they vote for the same kind of content, they get rewarded more. Because you get more of what you reward, you get more votes like that.
Until convergence.
If there is one singular design flaw in the Steemit architecture, and I have pointed out several design flaws from the game design perspective in the last several months, this would be the big one. It takes what should and could have been a signal indicator about the desirability of content at an individual basis and breaks it. Wastes it. And you start getting emergent systems as described above.
You might find some of the tinkering I've done in the last few weeks with discovery and mapping on the system to be interesting. Hopefully you do, anyway. PageRank, the algorithm that Google uses to rank pages, isn't really relevant to the way that people use Steemit, unfortunately. The problem goes back to divining the intent of an up vote. If we knew that the majority of people/entities were voting things up because they like the content, we could do something with it. But because it's rooted in trying to predict what's going to go viral/what other people with higher SP reserves are going to find worth voting up, the whole thing falls apart as a means of quality signaling.
(It's funny. I recently saw you referred to as a Haejin footsoldier, but one of the most interesting links to discussion of discovery algorithms I've had recommended to me this week came from you linking to someone else who is very clearly and aggressively against the whole crypto cult Ellison Waves bullshit, with a very clear intent to specifically be talking about Haejin. Since that would be behavior inconsistent with you as described, I find it amusing.
You'll probably discover that I find anything that is unusual in terms of oddity amusing.
If it's any comfort, my recent poking about suggests that thanks to Haejin and Bernie going at each other hammer and tongs, they effectively have, collectively, almost no impact on the voting pool as a whole. Aside from the poor pastor to get caught in the fall out and the cross fighting.
I have a pretty strong argument that down voting in general is wasted effort because it effectively counts as a micro vote for everything else on the blockchain except the one thing that you flag, including everything else that you don't want. But that's a post for a different time and, honestly, I think I've determined that no one actually cares if Flag Wars make a difference or change things, they have too much fun raising the pitchforks and torches and wasting their time running off to the tower as often as I can.
I agree that Bernie is a menace, but mainly because he's just an asshole and not really because he decides to pick people out and then try to stomp them off the platform. He does that, too, but that's not behavior that we can really do anything meaningfully about given that, collectively, his bot swarm has as much SP as one of the major whales.
I understand why you might be motivated to keep rocking the Flag Wars, but it's wasting whatever SP you have on things you definitely don't want rather than signaling to the system and to creators who make things you do want.
But that's just me. You do you.)