In my opinion the main problem is that people here vote for people, not for articles. Content doesn't matter at all (at least for almost everyone with some kind of weight, of course there are a lot of manual curators and communities like Hive account@ocd trying to found good articles) but most of the daily reward pool is for the same users, everyday, no matter what they post, you can check it by looking the trending page, its sad but its true. So its kinda obvious that minnows are using bots, its the only way to get some votes and some $$ to cash out. Everyone arrives here pretty excited and when they realize the truth about circle voting they just leave, I managed to get almost six or seven people here in the last couple of months, and sadly no one is still here. Its great what you say Hive account@acid about not selling delegation, also everything you did and keep doing with the Hive account@ocd, its awesome to have more curators willing to read and rewards good content, but the closed voting circle is literally killing steemit.