An excellent post Dave, resteemed.
I doubt you'll get much response from whales and witnesses, mainly because the majority are involved in the cash machine / laziness you discuss above.
The bots are here to stay I'm afraid, they make the owners/delegators too much money to give up.
There could be space in the market for more 'ethical' bots though, we shall see...
Thank you very much @abh12345! I see that at least one witness @steemcommunity (@paulag upvoted too) isn't afraid to "go on the record" on this issue. So even though I only got one witness/whale to weigh in, at least I know one of my 30 for sure! ;)
I think the bots will stay in some form, I agree. But the good thing is the longer they stay as they are, the lower the steem price will have to drop to reset the imbalance. Its the basic laws of nature, and frankly I love to hear their squeals when it drops as that means they are waking up!
I think there needs to be a major marketing campaign to talk about the paid upvotes and who is getting what from where.... and the policies that are agreed upon to keep minnows suppressed and keep major stakeholders close to the same % influence they currently have.
I think people would be surprised to know that @hajein is not in the top 10 earners when we account for incoming wallet transactions, curation rewards and alt accounts.
Why do people get so up in arms about @hajein taking a share of the reward pool when we have some unethical/dishonest bot owners pulling in more daily to their wallets from their scams? <-- these people feed off the newbies promising them more views and followers while not even looking at the post they upvote at a loss to the person buying the vote ... and then there are all the spam bots that spam your wall, with a dishonest representation, if they upvote you...
I call them scams because they are advertised as being 100% upvote auctions; but in reality you get a max fixed return that is lower than advertised.
My hope is maybe if we talk about these upvote scams and the owners, similar to what the people did to @haejin, then the delegators will stop loaning their infleunce to these unethical services and instead think about the long term health of the platform over short term monetary gains from a scam.
interesting point of view @royaleagle! :)