What if promoted content had 0-returns? What if you pay to only advertise and the bot vote rewards get sent to null? Then it would really be about promoting a post, and not getting ROI...

Fixing the system ideally would require no automating or botting behavior, where only people's real actions counted. One way is where only apps were granted access to the chain that upheld the proof-of-brain system, and users had to vote through an app. But that's not going to happen. Then only real mouse clicks would be allowed to vote. A blockchain has many issues where a "fix" is possible, but not desired by many because everyone wants "decentralized" everything to be able to do anything. So there is automated voting, auto this and that, bid bots, etc. But a responsible group could authorize apps, and if they allowed automated actions through an api their access would be revoked.

The top 19 witnesses are a group, so already we don't have everything simply decentralized to make decisions, like approve code changes for the chain. A blind focus on pure decentralization is hampering the resolution of problems. People are required to make things work, not simply "whatever the code allows",a s if the code can account for the complexity of human interactions and behavior. Decentralized code has its limits.

Incentivized downvotes and higher curation rewards won't change anything. All the bidbots need to do is change how much they charge for a % of vote, and everything is more in favor of 0-work automated curation and getting even more returns from curation rewards by selling votes, not going out to manually vote content. Paying people to flag would ruin shit big time, as then any abusive flagging would be promoted because your even being paid to do it, why stop and upvote when you can bully people and get paid to do it.

@edicted also points out some issues with those so-called "solutions".

If no one bought votes, no one would sell votes. And if no one offered vote selling mechanisms, no one could buy votes. There are ways to change things. But, when money is the goal, things won't likely change without code making it restricted. And those restrictive changes aren't desired because there goes the easy money train.

Flagging for rewards and more curation rewards won't solve it, sorry. And they aren't the only solutions, as I've pointed to above. They are just more ways to reward the broken system.

Rewarding content more fairly is possible, and not having bidbots is one way to promote that behavior again. Yes, the changes require work and adapting to them, but they would make Steem a more honest place with better content evaluation. No? Decentralized systems have more issues and less ability to fix things, because anyone can do anything. If that doesn't change, then not much is going to get better unless people want to make it better by not doing the crap that doesn't make it better.

I do want to fix the system, but my solutions aren't well desired by others because "Decentralization is ultimate" or something...

I guess if we stay in the decentralized-only mindset (but we aren't really anyways becuse the top 19 are a group that make decisions for the rest as well), then we're stuck with some crap because decentralized systems depend on people making them work. If money keeps being used as the measure to get people to do things, then there will always be ways devised to ruin shit because "anything goes" that the code allows. If the code changes to disallow things, then things can change when people don't want to. But not likely to happen. So we're stuck with this experiment that will fail because people will just do whatever is allowed to make money. Unless the code prevents them. Anything I've suggested would be to put the bot vote rewards into null, and not go to the voe buyer. Then you'll see how popular buying votes is really. It's not just for visibility.

As for visibility, that depends again on people voting content to make it visible. Are the bidbots that destroy proof of brain and the core of a system that's supposd to bebased on others evaluating content to reward it, really worth it? Just to get visibility? Make the rewards from bidbots go to null, then it's not about making money, and it's only about visibility. The "only reason" (as you say) you created a bidbot service was to help people get content seen? Do you then not take a percentage of the profits? If you do, then it's not "only" to help them get their content seen, is it?

Thanks for the link. How do the suggestions there get implemented?