The vote buying pushes value to a narrow end with no risk to the sellers as what they are selling is access to a public pool, not their personal value but, people are buying in with what they earn from that same pool. It doesn't work.
If you are interested for reference, I have written a couple past pieces dating back 7 months:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@tarazkp/pride-and-foolishness
Funnily enough, surfermarly has been complaining again about the lately yet, she is one of the heaviest beneficiaries of being an early adopter. It seems that the ancap want legislation to protect their wealth now.
Bidbots are a scourge on the platform and will lead to this place having no value. They make it a pyramid scheme where the bids have to continually increase to get value out. It will not lead anywhere good otherwise pyramid schemes would be great ideas for all economies.
I tend to agree that bid bots pose an economic issue for Steem. Do you have any solution?
I agree, it's a scourge of that casts an image of dishonesty and disintegrity on the platform. So many schemes are created that focus on extracting money/tokens, yet don't actually add value to the platform through the content that could draw people in. Exploiting the platform to extract the most without adding real value content is a problem since day 1, and these people always get to keep the money from their scammy behavior. Crooked behavior wins on the platform, always.