The problem came in when bidbots became open sourced, when there were one or two fine, they were structured and had business models, now every anonymous dog and his auntie runs a bidbot, so things are a bit crazy. However I have been on Steem since June 2016 and one thing I know is that having the freedom to boost ones' own posts is way more dignifying than having to beg and lick the you know whats of the whales who held all of the voting power, I think that was subhuman, vote bots are just like every other promotional aspect in life, paying for ads and higher rank on traditional media, getting yourself visible.

Before vote bots a small group of people were getting all the rewards and benefit, with bots it is more widely distributed. It isn't ideal but I for one am happy I can just send some Steem and get some visibility on my post and not dm a few buddies to see if they will help me out in exchange for some witness votes or having to vote them back later.

MinnowBooster is now a less supported bot in terms of delegation, but it supports a whole team of people as can be seen on https://buildteam.io and has helped give rise to projects like @tokenbb and to take over the @ginabot project and keep it running.

Proactive is hard, Ai could be an answer, have it recognise what an abuse post looks like and deny it an upvote, but the issue is there are so many bidbots that if one service blocks them they can go to another. We do have a community whitelist on MinnowBooster that can help as a proactive measure to ensure the larger votes only go to whitelisted authors.