When I joined Steemit, I was happy to see a social media platform without all the ads such as those that Facebook and other traditional platforms deliver. But with the increased use of bid bots, basically, every post boosted with one of these is a promoted post. But contrary to traditional social media platforms that mark this kind of posts as "advertisement", there is nothing like that on Steemit and the only way of seeing if a post was promoted is opening it and scrolling down to see who has upvoted it - and with smartmarket, not even this is possible anymore! This especially is a problem for heavily boosted posts advertising shady ICOs or crypto sites such as those often found on the front page. There is a reason that many traditional platforms have banned ads for ICOs and that reason is not that they fear Steemit or the Blockchain, but that there are a lot of scams in the crypto world. But even for regular posts, I see a problem with them not being market as promoted posts.

If I was in charge of managing vote bots, I would make it mandatory to use a certain tag such as "advertisement" or "promoted" as the first tag of a post for it to even be eligible to buy votes. This would be the only way to mark ads on Steemit without making changes to Condenser and every other UI for the Steem blockchain.

Besides that, while I have been using vote bots myself in the past, I now believe that buying paid upvotes on great posts can be counterproductive for content creators because this disqualifies a post from getting a curie upvote which is easily possible every 2-3 weeks for great content when using curated tags such as #travelfeed, but if people decide to buy votes to get more visibility they don't have this opportunity.