If you looked back on the beginnings of Steem and compared it with today's situation you'd see that the whole culture of the platform has completely changed. The original vision of giving value back to those who create value has changed to give value to those how are able to pay for it. From a content and quality-oriented platform we've constantly evolved towards a purely profit-oriented platform, where profit means individual wealth and not common (community) wealth. Self-voting and excessive vote buying have become standard.
Now projects such as @curie and @communitycoin still support the original idea of promoting quality content and spreading rewards towards smaller accounts. Bid bots promise supporting small accounts while the only ones that effectively benefit from vote trading are those who sell their votes. At the same time, bid bot owners don't open and read content before upvoting it, so they have no effective control over their voting power and don't assume any responsibility when abusive content reaches trending positions thanks to their contribution. They rather rely on the community and services like steemcleaners to balance rewards if they mistakenly upvote abusive content. In my opinion everybody needs to assume responsibility for their votes, whether you manually curate or bots do it on your behalf.
From my understanding, in a tokenized environment attention is the most valuable currency. Putting it up for sale weakens its original value. Why spending hours in editing content if you can copy-paste it from the internet, boost it to the trending page and get full attention?
I'd love to see moving ourselves into the exact opposite direction, where attention needs to be earned through creativity, uniqueness and dedication and where value is given back to those who create value as it was originally defined by the founders.
I can't speak for the whole community just for myself, but I'd personally love to see a more content-driven and quality-oriented approach in the future.
RE: Just another day on Steemit, why I feel helpless.