I support bid bots but I'd like them to have more caution and be selective about what content they are promoting. I know they are bots and can't comprehend post contents like we humans do. But bot owners can check what contents are getting high percentage of their votes and take action accordingly.
I take the bid bots as advertising service like FB, Google Adsense. I am paying them to make my content visible that I can attract curators/readers to vote me, gain followers or make my presence known. Sure not everybody will appreciate my contents, but there are some they may do. There is nothing that gets support from everybody. I think Hivemind will fix this problem or at least I hope.
If you remove bid bots who will get to trending more frequently? People with lots of SP or friends and acquaintances of whales and dolphins. Because people will always want their or their friends' well-beings.
Some people are concerned what the social aspect of it when everybody can use bid bots and boost their contents. I do not know about others I sometimes read articles from trending and hot, and most of the times I read interesting articles from my feed (I came here from my feed).
So, my suggestion would be a global blacklist which willing bots will follow. I want bots to be more responsible because people won't be.
I'd like to here others' opinion too.
This is true, and that it is demonstrates that bidbots are a symptom of the underlying problem that degrades Steemit as a society: stake-weighting. Money isn't virtue. Virtue matters in society, and substituting gross mammon for virtue is perhaps the most degrading thing that could happen to a society.
Steemit suffers as a result.
I have strongly advocated substituting rep for SP as a metric for weighting VP. While rep is still gamable, it is far less so than SP, and would result in a far more equitable distribution of rewards, while vastly improving the responsiveness of rewards to quality of content. Most things valuable about Steemit as a society would be greatly improved by this.
Investor participation is not one of those things, however. The problem is that those with substantial financial assets tend to be folks focused on financial matters, and the worst of them are naught but whores, pimps, or pirates, without anything substantial to offer society.
I but rarely stray from my feed, except by following links from posts I discover in my feed, as I did to get here.
New is chaos, and trending is a swamp of profiteering. I find discord a better source of #tag specific posts than the #tags themselves.
There are some UI issues Steemit could improve, and that is one of them.
The most important, IMHO, is that bidbots are promotional/advertising services, and posts and comments availed of them aren't appropriately tagged, which is degrading to society, dishonest, and stupid. It's stupid to allow advertising to masquerade as honest opinion because it is a lie that misleads people into valuing the paid opinion equally or more than actual reason and understanding, which is difficult to overestimate in the degree to which it contributes to harming people and society they comprise in fundamental ways.
A crappy hypothetical example of such harm: being microwaved is bad. At a certain point it is fatal. How bad it is at lower doses is unknown, because paid advertising/pr/promotion of microwave based goods and services substitutes the interests of such services seeking profits for the interests of folks trying to raise kids that survive, and does so using every subterfuge possible, including lying.
Posts claiming that microwaves are perfectly safe, or even beneficial, surreptitiously made by gaslighters using bidbots can trick people into believing such claims are widely supported, when in fact they're venal profiteering by businesses that may well be killing people without regard while seeking nothing more important or valuable than financial rewards.
Society is far more valuable than mere money. Stake-weighting not only disregards that fact, but obscures it by making the only metric of value economic.
That is why there are votebots. They're not the cause, but a symptom of the underlying problem of substituting for the real blessings of society mere money.