The usage of bots has taken centre stage this days. I wonder why they were allowed, but it matters a little now, the problem is how we can overcome the problems they cause, I mean, upvoting and promoting content that has been copied or does not even worth that much is the one that makes things bad by me. Steemit is created with good intentions but creativity has turned it into a battle field. People who can create bot are creative but misusing bots is not so good at all.
It makes some of us lose hope because we cannot create bot or fund them to help us as we have nothing.
I understand your frustration with some of the stuff that is happening on here but ultimately it is like anything. It is a battle for power, money, and reputation so the lines get very blurry on what is good for the community and what isn't. Everyone has their own opinion on ever piece of it.
could the use of bots be stopped or blocked via a hard fork?
Essentially not. All those accounts are doing is giving an upvote. So there is no real way to stop that from happening. If if you added to the code and basically said that a vote would be nullified if a person sent money to the memo before the vote occurred or something of that nature then it could just be written to fire the upvote off out of another account.
The whole upvote service could have happened from Day 1 in 2016 but I feel at the time it didn't because so many had some sort of utopian outlook on this platform and that seemed to go against the culture here are first. Then when it happened it was clearly something that people had different opinions on. Now we are seeing it pressed to about the max.
Any attempt in code to stop the upvote would be like this.
The only real way I can see to stop it is having Steemians with over 1000 sp and a reputation of 50 or something Steem Connect to another site and then vote on certain topics like flagging @haejin or other things of that nature and that the witnesses would carry that out like a representative of the communities wishes.