I think the obvious solution is to incentivize curation much stronger. If people would be rewarded for good curation based on their SP (and not only through curation clubs like steemfollower) then it would still be worth to buy steem.
In other words it should always be much more lucrative to vote for someone else than for yourself. That could also be a way for the bid bots to be less lucrative, I think.
Because without good curation, good content will fade away like it's already happening.
And without good content, we could just let the bots fight a 'return on investment war' for the reward pool without any content at all.
This is a good suggestion, @funcrypto.
However, how would that incentivize people to buy Steem tokens? Also, this might encourage bots in other ways.
I don't know exactly how to do it, and I know that the curation share of the profit used to be higher and was changed to give more money to the creators (look how that went...).
But I you look at spotify or similar, people spend a lot of time doing good curation without getting too much in return. And without the playlists they make it would be really hard to discover good jazz or other niches.
So there is definitely a crowd who love to do that. So how about "playlists" for good posts?
I'm sure there are tons of other sites who have cracked the 'good curation code' that steemit could be inspired by. And if it then is communicated that those curators actually earn money here, then it should be a no brainer for many people.
I agree with you that the main reason for buying steem right now is return on investment. So the curation awards need to take that into account. And maybe it would just lead to even more bots or rich professional, corrupt curators.
I don't know, but I'm sure there are lots of good ways to do it out there that could be copied.
Those platforms you are referring to do not offer direct money returns to people. People do it voluntarily. This makes genuine. On the other hand, Steem offers direct financial return, and money corrupts people.