Bots can be used to vote for trusted authors, then unvote manually on review once a day, etc.

With the current system, there's a big advantage to voting early so as an optimisation problem, this is not going to be the best way and so will not "naturally" attract people. And it's not just about curation rewards, voting early draws more attention to good posts, so helping it snowball. For posts you believe in this is desired.

There are indeed better ways to use bots, but I'm still for consciousness being what drives actual social media.

I'm coming round to this way of thinking and trying to think how bots can fit in better. The argument I make above is not necessarily the best way that Steemit can be, but it makes the most sense with the way it is. A change, probably a fairly core one, is needed to encourage more conscious engagement. That is if it's agreed there's an engagement problem. Some prominent witnesses I spoke to did not think it was 😕