I agree with you partly, how I see is that "only" organic evolution has the ability to settle this up but that's an intuitive thought which even I share but there is no data or analysis backing that up.
Bidding for attention is not bad, but there is a massive difference between bidding for attention and bidding for money. The former ensures you get more eyeballs on what you want to promote, that's what fundamentally advertising means and Steemit has made a promote section for that but using bid bots is like trading, I guess upvote trading is what people call it. People don't care about the content, Plople don't care about if others read it, all you care about is the ROI, that is not what this platform is for. I agree some content goes in the trending section but that is rare.
The alarming things is the volume of delegation it polarizes, we are building a platform for Artists and creators. Working on in for 6 months and have recently launched the Alpha but it is difficult for us to get delegation and support genuine users because it's almost impossible for us to offer the ROI the bid bots offer. Any thoughts on this?
In my experience, building a community takes between 2 and 5 years. This time span increases each year, because the field is getting more and more crowded. Community building is painstakingly difficult and slow. Look at Steemit, it took two and a half years to have more than 100,000 users interacting constantly (I know the official number of accounts is over 1 mil, but I think only the active users are really relevant).
Looks like you got yourself into a long term project.
Yeah that's absolutely true, It is definitely a long-term thing and in end being able to build a community must be worth the pain 😅 Thanks for the reply :) If you have any time do check out www.1Ramp.io, we ahve released the Android App would love to get your feedback.
Just had a quick look, seems interesting. Good luck with it!