RE: What if people start selling their votes?
This is a good proposal, but your comic is probably the wrong choice for the topic since it's not actually about bots per se.
Your idea of making it "ok" to sell your vote, is something that will just happen naturally and probably IS occurring already. Notice that the Wang bot was only voting one account over and over again, but then it suddenly voted for @fyrstikken . Bots are characterized by repetitive behavior. For a bot to break it's MO? Something happened, it probably involved the exchange of cash or other favors.
The truth is that as people seek to maximize their profits on this platform, they will pool and collect into what amounts to "pump groups".
Perhaps even just lending out their voting power to a bot farm that then sells "vote power", in much the same way you can buy hashpower for your favorite altcoin from botherders on the darknet.
Doing this would be in the economic best interests of the individual voters because they are joining a programme that is going to force a topic to trend, thereby maximizing their curation income.
Getting into an arms race with the bot builders is always going to be a losing proposal. The very best we can do is to train the bots to like what we like and ignore & downvote trash.
I have, what I believe will solve the bot problems but it boils down to your comic. I'm interested in thoughts, feedback & comments on it. Thanks!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach
@williambanks I am pretty sure @wang voted for my post because he actually read what I wrote and liked what he read.
A lot of people are buying upvotes atm. And more so during these down times. It is not a totally useless strategy, but should it be done right now when the SP is so low and the reward pools are so drained?
There is a huge discussion on this thread. Come and give your point of view :)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@yoda1917/randowhale-booster-worldclassplayer-users-just-halt-for-a-moment