>But, such a thing will never occur as long as a single person makes the decision to vote manually.

Why, it only requires a saturation of abuse, and it might never lose all it's value yet the point is who will choose to publish or engage here when there's free alternatives such as ZeroNet to publish and other social media like Minds and Medium and unfortunately we are inching twords the inevitable event horizon, at a certain point if we continue remaining neutral or complacent it will be no return, the stake mechanic ensures that.

In saying that vote selling and even worse vote buying are negative it's because I'm considering only the aspect of what's abusive to the ethos of STEEM. Are there positive undertones to those things? Sure, yet they are clothed in overcoming them, or simply in challenging us to be able to overcome them. If you think they have value, other than as a worthy adversary, I'm very interested in what they are. I'll let you know now that one of the sharpest most morally astute people on here, @son-of-satire asked the community for such a debate and guess who was the only one who took up the challenge of pro bidbots? I'll go back and review what I argued in favor of bidbots if you want and post it here, maybe it'll inspire a response from you.