In today's "A year ago today" series the top author payout of $8589, was given to 
- the creator of Dogcoin - that introduced himself to the steemit community.
Another interesting post is from 
where he describes his vision on a balanced platform, and between the paragraphs he describes what he thinks about voting bots. See below a quote:
Objectively Bad Behaviors
As someone who holds to a subjective view of reality, I like to refrain from making absolute value judgements. I also want to avoid pushing my value judgements on other people. So when I talk about objectively bad behavior I will do so without respect to the nature of content or individual voter’s opinions.
The goal of Steem is to reward users proportional to the value they bring. An objectively bad behavior is one where a user manages to get large rewards while providing others with little value. Unfortunately, value is subjective.
While it is hard to differentiate the relative value of two different things, I think something objective can be said for something that provides no value. If we assume that all information has some positive value, then the lack of information has no value. People casting votes communicates information. Every post with unique content contributes information. The value of the information provided is subjective.
A voting robot that votes “randomly” provides no new information. A poster that publishes “random” content also provides no new information. It is all noise. Some people might even say that by increasing the noise floor this kind of behavior consumes resources and destroys information and therefore could have objectively negative value.
What we can conclude from this is that “objectively bad” behavior is any behavior that can be automated using unsophisticated software and which yields the individual oversized profits.
Authors Paying themselves for Doing Nothing
This type of behavior has one user sucking value from the whole while providing no new value. Generally speaking, this kind of behavior is discouraged by the n2 rewards curve. The rate of return for self-voting on garbage post is so low for most users that it isn’t worth the effort. This reward curve forces collaboration and collusion to actually get meaningful value out of the platform.
A whale is a collusive group. This means that a whale has enough stake to earn a huge profit by voting on their own post regardless of post quality. The only thing that keeps whales from frivolously voting on themselves is the potential to be down voted by other whales. This creates a check and balance at the highest levels which protect the system from abuse.
Curation Rewards for Doing Nothing
This type of behavior is when a whale creates a bot that simply up votes everything from reputable users regardless of quality. This kind of behavior can be countered by other whales only by pushing the author rewards toward 0.
Suppose a post is sitting at a $100 pending payout and a whale up votes it to $1000 with a single vote. Other whales see that as abusive and place a counter acting down vote restoring it to $100 pending payout. The abusive whale will get the vast majority of the $25 curation rewards on that post.
When it comes to curation rewards the system is currently unbalanced. There is no way to negate the profits of abusive curators.
For the full post see the link below
