What you bring up about friends voting is interesting. I think in many ways human nature tends to affect Steemit the same way it affects real life.

In real life its hard to get ahead, on Steemit its hard to get ahead. In real life greed and lazyness causes people to cut corners, on Steemit money being involved causes people to cut corners and try to game the system. In real life nepotism happens and people tend to help friends and family so the same is goign to happen on here. So I think some of what's going on is just bound to happen.

So if I follow your saying its a negative that we vote for our friends regardless of whether their content is good or bad? I would agree with you, I know I do that, there's a handful of people on here who every post they make they get a 100% upvote from me but I also try to spread some love around and upvote new people and various people I see who create good content.

In terms of that vs bid bots I would almost compare it to spinach vs steroid for athlets. Performance enhancing drugs are now allowed in most sports. Athletes can however eat spinache which is healthy and improves their performance to an extent but not to the extent of steroids or HGH. I would say voting for freinds is like spinach and bid bots are like steroids.

Steemit will never be perfect because people aren't perfect and life isn't perfect however as we can see by what's going on right now steemit isn't doing the best it has.

remember when people in africa and asia used to be steem ambassaddors and be posting pictures of their whole town wearing steemit shirts or holding steemit signs? we dont see that anymore. remember when people were posting quality long form content everyday? those people now post once or twice a week and some havn't posted in like 30 days. now that all the everyone getting rich off crypto hype has died the platform has gone downhill. when money isn't here to keep people around quality content and a good experience has to do it and we dont really have that here to the extent we need to