Reading your comment again it made me think about how this method could be used to create markets that can't be manipulated by HFT bots.
It requires a reputation system to stop the bots!
Steemit's model is based on financial markets, which deprecate the influence of social factors. But they put a forum in, which means eventually the social will have to rise to equal the power of stake... Or someone will fork it so it does.
Yes I guess in the end bots can be programmed to replicate any human behaviour.
I naively thought that you could score a post as human interaction through counting the comments, subcomments and upvoted comments and the number of unique commenters.
Assuming flame wars would not be voted or flagged down.
But I guess once the bot programmers figure that out and they have access to 1000's of bots that could be defeated as well... sigh....