I share your sentiments, as you know. But, a couple things I would like to add for any readers out there who are making use of pay-for-vote bots, is that;

1. The whales are still earning on curation rewards after selling their votes. The whole point of curation rewards was so that people could earn from the Steem power by voting on quality content. Now the whales who are doing this, are earning curation rewards for seizing and auctioning off a portion of the rewards pool.

2. Because so much of the reward pool is now reserved for "pay for vote bots," the whales that would previously have been voting on the content they come across anyway, are no longer doing so anywhere near as much. So, people have essentially started paying to ensure that the whales stop voting for good content, and instead vote for whomever is willing to pay them. This is driving a lot of the self-voting that is going on because people who are not using the bots are having an immensely hard time making any money worth the time they're giving to Steemit because the whales have stopped curating correctly.

This is killing Steemit. And very fucking quickly.

Decent post, @clayboyn and thanks for raising some awareness of this, because everyone seems to have their head in the sand on this one.