However, who can become a whale? Anyone with enough money to invest in steem / steem power can. That skews the premise Steemit was built on, to create a platform where individual contributors are incentivized to create + curate content valuable to others.

I understand @dan & @ned created Steemit in such a way to preserve and grow their personal investments, and part of that is coding "the rules" to not only insure that, but also to insure the platform itself is sustainable. However, other whales have invested who found a way to game the platform, taking advantage of the rules @dan & @ned put in place to protect and sustain the platform.

I see no inherent problem with multiple accounts operated by one real identity and anonymity of accounts. The root causes of the gaming arise from bots and the fact that anyone regardless of their intentions can buy large amounts of influence. Would it possibly help to level the playing field to limit the power of bots inversely proportional to the amount of SP the bot operates with? If you're a whale why do you need bots to further bolster your influence?

Another aspect that complicates our view of activities on Steemit is the nature of these "bots". What is a bot? It is simply a set of rules (i.e. a computer program or code) that carry out a predefined set of operations. Those operations can be very simple or very complex. It's conceivable that highly complex bot programs based on AI could be used to take advantage of loopholes in the steemit platform to "game" the system. It would be interesting if there were a way to identify the actions performed by bots and surface that info to the steemit community. Should bots have a reputation score also?

I'll readily admit I don't understand the nuances of this platform, not only from a social perspective but also details in the coding. Having been involved with the BitShares platform long before Graphene existed my knowledge is far above average on the technical underpinnings of Steemit, but I wouldn't hazard to quantify it with on a 1 to 10 spectrum, it's just too complex a beast.

From the earliest discussions about steemit I've always had reservations about the ways in which it might be gamed, either through "voting guilds" or other means. I don't think guilds are necessarily bad, if they are nothing but subsets of the community that vote with a collective agenda. I see the biggest threat being what I opened this comment with, the fact money can buy a lot of influence irrespective of concern for the platform or the community. It's the same potentially corrupting influence that money has on politics - a tendency towards centralization of power.

Perhaps in the final analysis we'll discover that any type of PoS system, be it capitalism or PoS/DPoS blockchains, will as free or rigid as the strongest influence in it allows. Since @dan & @ned aren't the wealthiest people on the planet, their influence can be super ceded.

This post was indeed very brave, and I commend you @ats-david for your willingness to post it and the thorough analysis it contains.