We have two basic kinds of bots.
Type one is the bot intended to profit its owner. The bid bots and pay for vote services such as minnowbooster are an example of this type of bot. They might pay some lip service to helping the community but it all about the $$$. What they do is push posts to the top of trending based on how much money the author has to spend rather than how good the content is.
Type two are the community bots. Examples of these bots are minnowsupport and qurator. They have moderators that ensure they don't upvote junk. What they do is give a start to new steemit users so they don't get fustrated and quit.
Type one bots are bad optics
Type two bots make us look like a community that others want to join.
I support quite a lot of the community bots because they have a great role to play in building the platform. I hope the post made it clear that I think communities are best placed to judge quality and so empowering the community bots has that feedback effect of them being able to reward quality and in return grow themselves and benefit their members.
Though, I trust you wouldn't approve of me using MB to give this post a visibility boost? I think my message is topical enough to justify the boost and hopefully use the visibility to help me find my community longer term. I tried to exercise some restraint on how much of a goat I gave this post; enough but not too much.
minnow booster is part of the current ecosystem of Steemit. I make no judgement on you using it. My concern is on the optics to the outside world. Do you want short term gain or do you want Steemit to become what it has the potential to become? I was there at the beginning of Google+, same potential. Now it's all porn and glitter waterfalls.
I just delegated to MSP-Creativebot and I'm a member of Qurator. We each have to find our own way.
Thanks. Pretty much everything you're saying about MB Goats could be applied to Promoted posts. The differences between the two are subtle except that MB is decent at giving visibility in ways that Promoted did not when I tried it.
I see Steem's potential as its ability to support multiple different types of content and communities. I don't subscribe to the idea that Steem should do nothing but take on Facebook or Medium or Instagram. It can do all of these with the right tools build upon the blockchain and the community to support it.
The SMT's will indeed provide multiple niche products. APPICS being the first to market with an Instagram competitor. Steem is going to do just fine. Steemit? I'm not so sure about.
If they want to take on anyone, mainly they just need to make it easier to use.