"...Let's just all accept that it's all about the money..."

No.

You were absolutely correct to that point. There was a point you didn't touch on, and that is what ties bidbots to autovotes: people. The purpose of social media isn't to wind up bots and have them spout verbiage and vote for us.

Take the issue back to the principles @meno speaks of. The essential purpose of social media is to engage with people, not their avatars. Trails, selfvotes, bidbots--all automated voting--defeats that purpose and degrades society.

We don't need to give up because there's a problem, and that's what the quote advocates.

I'd like to point out that I believe this problem has solutions that I see being approached with the same effort that is dealing with stake-weighting. Oracles are going to have to be able to certify with some degree of accuracy that an account is a person and not a sock. This not only makes 1a1v possible, but the elimination of votebots.

While curation trails, autovotes, and etc., will still be possible, oracles will also be able to suss out this behaviour, and communities that choose to will be able to disable SMTs from being dropped to accounts that autovote.

It's always darkest before the dawn, and I hope that soon the dawn of SMTs, oracles, and communities potentiate leaping the predatory sharks and lazy asses that feed autovotes off the rewards pool.

While there will be communities that various dedicated profiteers and folks that haven't quite connected the basic social function principle with the harm that automated voting does to society, I expect that the benefits to communities actual social engagement exert will quickly make it obvious that allowing automated voting of any kind degrades communities and weakens society.

Millions of people around the world face the scourge of war, and believe it or not Steemit can do something about that. There are groups and posters that assiduously reveal details they gather through their careful research about Ukraine, Syria and the ME, and many governmental and institutional propaganda campaigns supporting war around the world.

Steemit is trying to do something about these evils, and the qualitative leap in societal power that SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities) enable will reveal new ways Steemit and social media empowered by SOC can impact evils in the world.

That won't happen if we're phoning it in, just automating and letting our bots do the voting.

There's a change coming. It will get better in ways we can't imagine, and power to do good things and stop bad ones from happening is about to increase by orders of magnitude on Steemit with SOC.