Actually that's what I observed too... without investing into bidbots you are a piece of sht on steemit. Sad but true. Even if you create 100% original, hard working and creative content people are still stingy with their upvotes. They mostly wanna to save their updates for themselves and not for the community. You can get a lot of followers who doesn't even upvote.
But at the other hand when you buy bidbots people see BIG curation in your post they will probably upvote to get their portion... so where is the best solution? That is the question...