I'm pretty new here and pretty hectic bot user so take it with some salt but indeed there are plenty things broken here. For starters, the reputation system is completely broken, indeed because of the bots. By the same token, the "community curation" is also broken because 1) the way curation works flies in the face of intuition; you get the best reward if you vote later rather than being the one who actually contributes most to the visibility and, well, actual curation of a post by voting it early. You're not gonna see this post that you're supposed to curate at 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 minutes. It just won't happen. I understand this is to stop spam upvotes through bots but so what, it doesn't work lol. And 2) because even when it works you aren't getting jack shit, once again unless you already have tons of money invested in your account. Special point 3) negative curation, i.e. punishing actually bad content is even more flawed because it's entirely at the whims of power users with a lot of money and frankly they act more like bullies and lunatics rather than people who care about actual discourse and quality. Much like most censors in the real world of course. Most people never bother to do this janitor work themselves because frankly why the hell waste their precious votes on punishing people? Therefore only the most ideological and out of their mind are pursuing negative curation. Yay, awesome!

I'm a broken record on this lol but I have high hopes that the Communities thing will help this a bit. Right now the site is kind of this big pit of stuff posted to it with only the tags to differentiate stuff and well people post all sorts of shit to all sorts of tags, so if you want to keep it clean and tight your only option is to make up a new tag that's not used yet by the torrent of shitposters on here. Which of course doesn't help your visibility at all lol. I'm low key trying to make #cgart a thing because the art one is already pretty inundated with lots of stuff and a bit too general. Then again having 5 tags is also kind of limiting, but spamming everything and anything remotely related in the tags makes them again be like all others and you get no differentiation anymore. But good grief man if you want to laugh (or cry, I guess) have a look over at the incredible shitposting going on in #photography. People are taking photos of every damn thing with their phone and then overbid on bots to get it upvoted. That part might make you feel a little better, SO often there are absolute clowns dropping stupid amounds of SBD on bid bots that have no hope of ever voting that much, thus ruining it for everybody including themselves. I'm talking dropping 50 SBD on a bot that can upvote at max $30. Yes I've seen that, and far worse. It takes a special kind of moron to be this dumb with this much money and not take like an hour observing how the hell all of this works before doing that.

But anyway lol, I think the communities might help because then you can have these groups of people around a shared topic or place or even sub category of something bigger, much like how it is in Reddit. So there it is conceivable that there is a designated voting bot for the community that helps reward good posts (i.e. you delegate some of your SP to it and gain some curation), and/or serve as a mod blasting shit posts that are against the rules. But having the community more focused would help with the votes and visibility a great deal already. I would rather like some actual information on this new stuff because it's been teased for months or a year already with no real news on when it's coming or what it's going to look like.

As for me personally, basically at this point I have entirely given up on curating the Steemit way, and just upvote stuff I like regardless of the time that has passed. I also set up SteemAuto "Fanbase" auto voting for people whose stuff I regularly enjoy, so that I always upvote their stuff when it comes out. I treat it like a subscription. I'm building up SP and would like to use this account to benefit other artists (I upvote myself on my posts, which is usually one per day for 3D rendered artwork) and basically use the rest to upvote others. Hence why I'm using the bots, and quite honestly, as grim as it sounds this is about the only real opportunity I have right now to make money. In future I would rather like to help along with the communities and bring some more people here.

The real, massive, number one problem here is that there aren't enough users. I don't believe the almost one million users figure one bit, I promise you it's at least 50/50 real users vs bots and alt accounts. I mean themarkymark uncovers ridiculous bot networks every other day. So for those saying they think resteem services are somehow more noble than upvote bots, well you're wrong because it's a guy with 5000 fake accounts that they resteem to, and no one's going to see your stuff. I had something like 20 or 30 followers in the week when I signed up, even now I have almost 200 and I promise you pretty much all (like 99%) of that is like / follow spam accounts that just blindly follow new users and never do anything. With around 200 users you should be getting something like 20 or so votes on everything you post, right? If they are actual people who look at stuff. The other problem is, there's a profound lack of variety with the mob of users themselves. As in if you look around the only thing that gets any engagement here are non stop cryptocurrency talk. So we gotta really entice people to come to the platform in the first place, and the thing that is really hindering that is that on the whole it's not quite as functional as say Reddit and Facebook (who to be fair have had about a decade of work put into them by dedicated dev teams), while at the same time the whole getting paid thing is super flawed and completely unequal as well. Basically when you join your vote worth ain't shit, and in order for you to make literally a damn in terms of payout you need hundreds and thousands of upvotes by new accounts, or maybe a few high roller accounts throwing you a dime. And this is simply not happening because there aren't enough people here and frankly getting even a hundred let alone thousands of views on anything is something that takes some time to achieve, on any platform. So if the draw here is that you can get paid doing stuff, and then you see you aren't getting paid, how long are you gonna go like that? Why should I put so much time and effort into doing this stuff when I'm not getting paid? Plus doing this stuff costs money too of course, not just time. So people are gonna bail and the shit posts win out, or rather they are what's left. Not good.

Another thing that might help stop the bot problem is of course increased utility on the platform, particularly what you can do with Steem and especially SBD. People keep explaining it to me, but seriously SBD to me is like the bastard step child of Steem lol, it seriously has no real function right now. I personally would like to have a shop on here and would be interested to hear how that can be done. Because hey how great is it that people can earn freaking cryptocurrency on a platform, and then actually spend that on goods on the very same platform? Then we wouldn't see the price of Steem vs SBD go to shit all the time for no good reason, but there would be a genuine price dynamic. Or rather there would be a good reason to want to have SBD, because right now all you can do with it is spend it on bots. Steem is the one you can power up, delegate, lease, etc.

I don't want to be too negative there, like I said there's ways for it to improve but I don't think there is one silver bullet solution for everything. Rather, it's like politics or democracy. It's not so much about finding the best solution to how this society works, it's about finding the least bad one. Because everything and anything anyone will come up will be exploited to all hell by someone. It's up to us to find systems that aren't so easily exploited, or that somehow aren't affected by it or even take the exploitation into account. Steemit is a little vulnerable right now because it's not exactly a real society or anything, people don't really owe it an existence especially with so many other social media platforms already out there. As long as good stuff like DTube and DLive and DSound and DWhateverthehell keep coming and there's more to actually do then I think this platform will be ok. And I do think there's lots of potential.

Sorry to go on for this long lol, good luck with everything!