So, Im terribly new here but I can see that there is a big problem in steemit with the sold votes and the upvoting bots, I had this idea from reading "The heck is going on with steem" and now that I red "voting issues in the community" Im convinced that there is people thinking about this issue.
Here is the Idea summarized
It is possible to develop a software solution to promote the ethical behaviour of the steemit community through the human interaction with the steemit content.
As @guyfawkes4-20 points out, the problem with the voting behavior comes from the social aspect of the community but since at he moment the content that is promoted and featured by the algorithm is completely controlled by the bots and the bought promotions it is necessary to generate some kind of change so that proper behavior can become the new standard.
From the whale voting experiment and the experiences with @grumpycat we learn that the ethical standards of the community are diverse and decentralized so we need a flexible solution that allows the preferences to be set by the users.
As long as the human interaction with the content is valuable for the system we can develop a filter for the steemit content that identifies the ledger transactions behind the post and can react accordingly for example, if certain customizable criteria are met we could be "protected" from the content 
This could be triggered by multiple variables.
*like lists of actors e.g. if the post has recorded transactions with accounts in grumpycat's blacklist, I dont want to see it
*[we should also have whitelists of system bots and stuff like that]
*ratios
*If the artificial promotion of the vote is more than the community support, block it
*If the whale support for the article is higher than twice the minnow-whale rate in the network demographic, keep it away
*we could even have some very very strict rules like
*if it got artificial promotion, filter it
Still, this is only useful as long as the value of the network depends on how many hoomans are seeing the shitposts because this is a solution for the human interaction in the network not for the financial problem since the bots could be directed towards eachother generating inflation loops that would attract most of the tokens unseen by the people.
Conclusion
From the community aspect, it is possible to develop tools for the steemit users to help us enforce our ethical principles