Hi @yabapmatt
I have a suggestion, can you set the bidbots with fixed rate? This will protect the minnows to take a loss. This would stop overbought too. If not enough buyers, the leftover will be rollover and the bitbots will have less recover time for the next available upvote again. I have seen some1 spent 25sbd but got the vote just $50+, this was a loss one before curation.

I understood that steem advantage is the user base, which is a consequence of being the first mover on this field.

But an user base can exit a platform as quickly as they got in, when a better alternative become avaiable. In the end that is a Very small advantage.

Most of content publishers are here mainly because of the reason below:

* They already have a public, and steem add another way to bring revenue to their production
* People that never worked creating content, but wanted to try, and saw in steemit an opportunity to do It while maybe recieving some money for It (myself included)
* People that dont care much about creating content, but see there is money to be made here posting things created by others, sharing memes, linking YouTube videos, copying news, and lot of other shitposts. (Btw, this is the majority of the users)

Also, the system is too easy to game.

There is one simple thing that could be done by steemit inc. To actually bring quality:

Partnership with well established content creators.

Bring somemone who have a public and create good stuff in here, and use steem inc. Stack to promote them here (with a bottom page disclaimer, for transparency)

Now you Will have a lot of people that never heard of steemit joining in, because they favorite creator is here.

Also, user interface... Come on, steemit.com is a joke.

Yes, there is better interfaces like busy.org, but for the mass adoption, the base interface must the a lot better than what we have.

I Will be around, until a better alternative arrives. (And i bet a lot of people think like me)