This site is well rooted at this point, so it will always have traffic going forward. Narrative is a new competitor I have yet to look into (not even sure when they're launching) but the economics seem similar. I really don't know.
I'm all about the path of least resistance when it comes to anything (this is where my trading experience layers over into life). Time is precious and efforts are usually better spent elsewhere where yield is greater. I would say start by looking at where you have the highest ability to change something in the here and now. I realize this is broad but again, all the creators of this site need to do is stop giving so much visibility to garbage. Get rid of the trending page alltogether. Rearrange content. All top layer stuff. The fighting around here is basically a laughing stock though and why so many people don't take it seriously. Again, it turned into a video game, not a publishing platform. This Heijin guy's analysis is total rookie junk meant to serve him and him alone and yet I see 50 of his articles a day on here. I have zero interest in his stuff yet thats all I find without spending hours digging deep.
Another solution is to keep the website, nodes, and previous data intact and change the blockchain to prevent certain things in the future. Thats the great thing about the blockchain is we can just drop a hardfork on the consensus of data. I mean we will never be able to prevent bots from being made but we could at least prevent post from making large rewards. As for the trending, hot, and promoted tabs, I tend not to look at those for content. My preference is looking at specific peoples blogs that I have met on here but that is easier said than done... Many would say that steemit is not the best way to make a profit and that if your end goal is that then you are better off on other platforms as steemit has many problems and to turn in run but I seriously doubt you need any more of that sentence from me. I would say steemit is a path of resistance, then again if someone has very little crypto knowledge I would say steemit is one of the easier ones to adapt due to not requiring the knowledge on getting and setting up a wallet (and securing it) so it definitely has a role but I feel its system is more of a beta...
You were talking about a newer competitor? Unless they learned from steemits mistakes then the first few weeks will be an easy way to make thousands of tokens, again unless they learned. I will look into it!
Yes here they are: https://www.narrative.network/
And I say play ball on a fork, why the heck not. I setup and ran a forum for a time that just provided rewards based on activity - amazing how things change when real money gets involved. If the mobile gaming industry is able to prevent bot abuse then why not anything else? I think anything is possible.
As we like to have everything decentralized, you can see why central authority exists in many cases. If they accumulate enough power, the wolves can run rampant and destroy the ecosystem.
The problem with bots on steemit is that they provide the API open source for third parties to develop apps for. That isn't to say we cannot make running bots more difficult with purely changing code but it can be very difficult to distinguish from honest human interaction and something being done by an app (as there is busy.org which also uses the steem blockchain along with some other sites). I mean even then you could simply write a python client that interacts with html elements directly and its, I have to say that it is easier making a bot for web applications than it is on mobile phones, though still not impossible.