A bot per se can not be bad or good or so, because he is just a program and we are not in any matrix (as far as I think;) you're right with that. But raping the reward pool with the help of such bot, even profiting out of that because often the upvote value is higher then the investment or selling votes and earning curation rewards for that, is bad in so far, that steem will go to zero substantially when behaviour like this spreads all over the place. Because that way, no real value is involved it is just crypto money sent around. It becomes a greater fool ponzi. You can count that! And with the post you are linking, that just proves that I am right, because they are already searching for an alternitive to implement where pay for vote is no longer possible the way it is at the moment. Bu this would be another token, I am really not convinced by that idea. New tokens and ICO's everywhere, everyone seeing this from an outside perspective would surely think this is a great big bubble which will pop very soon. The idea behind this steemit community must be a responsible rewarding system and this has to come from the joining people themselves, whether they are whales or minnows or whatever. In a decentralized system everyone is allowed to do whatever he or she wants. And so it can only work when peoble take responsibilities for their part of the game instead of just substantially draining it.