As a new user that plans to provide some well written article over a subject that I am passionate about, this is quite disturbing. My son, his wife, and myself have recently gotten steemit accounts and we're planning on having it become a "family" thing that got us discussing our personal interests along with, what we hoped, would be a community conversation. Finding out that most of the exchange of "ideas" is nothing more than bots manuvering for position is disheartening to say the least. Im hoping that it at least does not distract us from our original goal of intelligent discussions amongst ourselves. Thank you for the post, and keep up the great work.