It is a very difficult problem to solve, any automated solution will always be exploited by a bot, besides there is no interest on the part of the users that change either, most of the users that are in steemit only want to have more better income, and not it matters if it is for a bot or a human the objective is not a quality site, the target is increase the profits while these can be generated, and this is reinforced when users see that an image copied from the internet has $ 200 of profits while that your post, original is worth nothing.
I do not know what solution would be the most effective, what I can say is that avoiding the use of bots, would be a titanic task and you can not win
"the objective is not a quality site"
Even the CEO has said that Steemit.com is not their priority. The truth is I think Steemit may just be a test-bed for their precious SMTs, so I certainly hope they are a smashing success.
Exactly!
Folks that are only interested in maximizing profits should just go mine BTC.
"Folks that are only interested in maximizing profits should just go mine BTC."
Unfortunately, as long as it remains more profitable or easier to "mine" Steem via abuse than to invest in another DPOS coin or mine something via POW, we're going to see this issue.
It would be interesting to see an environment where accounts with no purchased stake actually have 0 vote weight, making spam less profitable outside bots...but I guess you'll still have the problem of trash post bot spam.