What you said here makes sense but people will still flock to voting bots because I feel that the advertisement from voting bots is an indirect effect. The actual effect, those who use voting bots aim at is profit. Promoting a post has no guarantee of a whale upvote or any upvote at all. But with voting bots, you get rewards.

If the promote option can be amended in such a way that half or a quarter of the sbd you used to promote the post goes into the payout, it would even the scales a bit.

I am still new here and I have never used either the promote tab or the voting bots that is causing so much angst on the platform but I feel that if voting bots are available for those with the funds to get their attention, then there should be something besides curation for the minnows to get into the trending categories. What do you think?

@erodedthoughts led me to your post and it is indeed a good one as he said. Stay safe. Peace.