@saswat036 you bring up another interesting point. I don't think this has to do with bid bots so much as a huge imbalance of power. For example my post in the first 8 minutes has over 110 upvotes and has earned something like $6 and then you see other posts that have like 7 votes that have earned over $30.

I could find even more glaring examples of posts that have hundreds of upvotes and earn $3 and posts that have 15 upvotes and earn $300 but I'm too lazy to search for them, but we all know this goes on. To me it would seem that once a post hits some threshhold of large support from the community that post should get some type of boost to make it more even with a post that gets just 1 upvote from a whale. It doesn't make sense to have a small handful of people yield so much more power than the entire community as a whole.

I'm not a programmer or coder or developer but I'm sure this issue gets a lot more complicated and the fix isn't that easy. For example if Steemit were to say once a post gets 200 upvotes its earns equal to a whale vote regardless of who upvoted it and how small those people are however at that point people would just buy 200 accounts and upvote themself 200 times.

I know Youtube had similar problems with thumbs up on videos so had to change their algorithm to focus on watch time and other engagement factors