I totally feel you man! Steemit is a weird place. I totally loved it the first weeks until I understood the dynamics. There is no slution to the problematics. People should be allowed to promote their posts with money, which we have in the "promoted" tab. But how could you possibly stop people from paying for votes... I think having a channel for "non botted" posts would be a awesoe beginning. Cant be so difficult to implement. Would love to see that. Apart from that, maybe we should just start our own tag like "friendsoffriends", would be cool to see how something like this plays out. I started to sort out all the people I followed in the beginning, only keeping the ones with quality content, like yours. Keep it up Chris xx