Well, I suppose there's always its usefulness as a currency....

Still, the question of scam is easily answered. Plenty of space for someone to come in with no investment and earn on comments and networking. I honestly don't know why scam was ever a question. Even when the big drop comes and people leave, I hope to be part of the second wave that can set a better standard for the platform. Or at least help whoever has a better vision for how things should be.

In terms of bid bot usage, I doubt anyone is spending money to buy SBD to fit into the bot system. As you well noted earlier, the returns are actually not good for a buyer, and pretty damn good for the seller (except if you consider that they could get more if they self voted). As the first scenario is not likely, I'm actually secretly hoping that the second option you mentioned which saturates the pool so that it becomes almost useless, and discourages its use altogether.

I have to say, if you look at the bot usage awhile back vs now, even the trending page has improved considerably from what I remember. I can only hope we do even more to clean it up further, but you know what? I went into the trending page the other day with the intent of flagging something, and ended up not doing anything because it all the posts looked to have a good amount of engagement and was not obviously spam. It may not have been been worthy of such a high amount but it wasn't flag worthy. Maybe I'm too nice. I'm thinking about flagging it still though. Maybe when I'm of a lousier mood.

This leads me to option 3: tell everyone to reserve one out of their ten 100% votes to just flag anything on trending that doesn't deserve it. That should discourage low quality bot usage also!