Hi @anomadsoul

I like what you write about here and agree with you.

If everyone wanted to think that way, there would be no problem at all.

I have to sweep for my own door first.
I have used bidbot in a peridoe before, but found that it was not right for me to use above the community so I ended it before HF20. I am very happy that bidbot is running manual upvote today.

I vote for some of those you call the "vote trading circle" and I will continue to vote for them because I like what they write. But a while back I set the votes in% lower to give even more votes to others

The same thing I've done with self-voting, I don't need it anymore.

I have supported many people on my journey here at Steemit since July 2016 and then I mean minnows and with many different competitions with good prizes in SBD and Steem. Now I support other projects and am a sponsor of SPUD driven by @streetstyle. I also sponsor the @art-venture run by @stef1 and @myskye. Of course, "they are part of my vote trading circle"
"vote trading circle" you have to look at with other eyes and not judge it equally because there are big differences going on here.

I also want to thank for upvote from @ocdb with manual curation
but after you gave it upvote I was immediately put down by others and it tells me about bad morals. It has happened several times when one bidbot upvotes me manually the other comes and gives me downvote.
here are the ones who gave me the downvote after I got the good upvote from @ocdb