I added you to my filter so any votes you get from me or any of the accounts using my voting service will be manual votes.

I don't agree that bots are the problem, though. I think it's just the lure of "easy money". Personally, I spend a lot of effort trying to prevent my bots from voting for poor quality content, or supporting people who plagiarize, buy or sell votes.

My expectation is that getting rewarded for posting here is going to follow a difficulty curve like bitcoin mining has followed for the last near-decade, and only when the difficulty ratchets up will the rewards come into better alignment with the post quality. And unfortunately, it'll probably always be hard to find quality content - look at twitter & facebook, and those folks aren't even chasing easy money. It's good to be conservative with "follow" and liberal with "mute" I think.

I've rarely even used steemit chat, so I don't have much of an opinion on that. I didn't even know (or remember) that @riverhead ran it. When I found out this morning, I voted for him as witness. Too little, too late, I guess, though.