As a relative newcomer to Steemit, I can see the pros and the cons from the bot side. Reddit was originally seeded with tons of fake bot users to encourage activity and usage among real users. In the long term I think they will need some curtailing but in the short term I believe that it helps newbies like me get exposure on our hard working posts.

For instance, I work incredibly hard on our posts writing 100% original content on addiction, life and recovery posts. They very rarely, if ever, get seen and so I rely on bots to help encourage activity on them from others. Otherwise, how else would it appear that the content has some activity on it?

I like the detail you've put in to this post and also the willingness to look at both sides of the coin. Thanks for the insight. Let me know what you think.