The thing I don't understand is why people are so against bid bots and other techniques like that. I can appreciate the goal of filling steem with quality content, but if Steem is to be a global money it needs to be viable in many ways, not just posting content.

I realize the concept was "proof of brain" and it quickly became "proof of bot" instead, but at the same time narrowing Steem's functionality is bad for the blockchain's adoption. I think it is wise to embrace businesses trying unique ways to profit. For example, I've been thinking something like a paywall would be good, but its an upvote wall where you have to upvote (irrevocably) first to see the content.

I think Steem has a lot of potential, but I'm not sure how much I buy into the notion that many people can truly make a stable income from upvotes. People tend to be too self-serving with their vote value or too whimsical. I've noticed plenty of people enjoy a post from me, comment but not upvote, likely because they want to keep the upvote value for themselves. So I think the traditional ebook sales method is ideal until we figure out how to increase the incentive for people to upvote others.

Frankly, I'd like to see self-upvotes go away entirely and upvote value decline when upvoting the same person multiple times in a week. This would get people to branch out and upvote strangers, not just keep to tight little upvote cliques.