I encountered the "bandwidth limit exceeded", too. As I read more of these articles and did some research on the subject, I'm filing in the blanks. This is the first article I've seen to explain the cause. The problem is so widespread that some people have powered up just to be sure they have enough Steem to work with.

I have a feeling that this issue can be traced down to the bots. I have tried bots myself, but now I have reservations about using them.

This platform is based on the idea of an attention economy. If attention is the most valuable thing you can give someone, a bot doing your voting is probably in conflict with the spirit and reason for being of the Steemit.com website: monetizing the attention economy.

Now in the comments for this article, someone mentioned that they were using bots to find good content worthy of their interest, and I have no problem with that. But if the bots are hindering our capacity to interact, a condition that I think is very likely to be confirmed, then we need to rethink our motivation for using the bots.

I'd be OK if bots were banned just to ensure our ability to interact on this platform. I'm not so sure that such a ban can be enforced, however. I do hope that this game will help to relieve the congestion and that the developers can find a solution to it that won't require a ban on the bots, as I see that some people appreciate their utility.