The first is DDOS attacks, somebody could just set various vote bots to continually vote on their articles forever, and after seeing some of the activity on here, I have to concede that that scenario is not only possible, but likely.
I think that would actually be difficult. Each bot needs to exist on Reddit/Facebook and can only vote once... so it becomes a lot of work to have tons of bots just to upvote your own articles. Plus until a bot has enough SP it doesn't really affect much...
I felt that if it is possible, we should program in a kind of easter egg vote machine. Whereby you can get a huge(ish) reward by voting on older content. If possible the algo could be tweaked so spending time on the page and commenting might also give you this easter egg reward.
You could code a bot to do that. In fact, making it just go to every article, wait an appropriate amount of time and then upvote would be trivially easy so all those awards would probably go to bots.
Maybe a check for posting/commenting would be more appropriate. Of course bots comment too so that might not work either.
Maybe allow bots to vote through the API, but humans have to vote with reCaptcha to get those kind of rewards?
You'd be surprised at the work people are prepared to go through, last year in the very early days of Steemit. We had various people creating bots to comment and then vote on those comments.
I think the money wasn't even very much, it was just a proof of concept, and it worked until @cheetah got on the case.
I didn't really explain the Easter egg idea properly. Even if you created a bot to go onto every article and wait, it wouldn't necessarily work.
Because the appropriate amount of time would vary wildly, so in some cases it might be a month, others 2 years. The point is to try and reward content long after it has been posted. So a particular article might have had 20000 views in 18 months after the initial posting.
One of those views and votes, will get the Easter egg, no one bot would ever be able to guess when that particular bonus would drop. Plus you could tweak it so that only answers of a certain length, referencing certain key words would even be applicable
Also you could do it so that the curation reward was shared out among the voter and 25 random people who had voted in the time period.
Dunno, it's a long running debate; and I'm sure it'll rage on for many more moons. It's tough to sort it so that everyone's happy, we'll see what the future holds :-)
PS, I once suggested CAPTCHA to the Steemit community, and it went down like a French kiss at a family reunion :-D
Cg