As someone who was initially drawn to SteemIt by the promise of 'infinite rewards from paid upvotes,' and then taken down a notch or two by downvotes from actual people on the site - I've learned the lesson that SteemIt shouldn't be taken for granted as a money mill, but instead the reward ratios should somehow be reworked so that the 15% apparent rewards on paid votes become nil or negative.

I'd also learned that renting SP and botting out my account as an automatic voter doesn't help the bottom line and proves to be a negative sum game, so I'd assume other people that get excited about 'free money' will be happy to play with paid votes - and we see this constantly, time and again on 'trending' and 'hot,' whereas there are less people renting SP because it's a 0-sum or negative-sum game.

Two cents!