Well a Upvote does basically no interaction at all. Its purpose is only to upvote your posts based on your sended bid. You can see it like a promotional service - you pay to receive a high upvote on your post. Higher upvotes means more people are gonna see and visit your content. This can generate you more follower and / or higher revenues. The bot does not kill or remove your social interaction ability.
If you want to grow a great Followerbase you need to interact on your own, an upvote bot only helps you get recognition.
Yeah but isnt the entire point of the platform to create a community moderation system? Upvoting with a bot is manipulation and doesn't truly reflect the quality and value of the content you produce.
I totally agree with you, with creating bots comes a high demand of abuse. It does not reflect the quality of your content. You are totally right.
In my opinion is the reason for a upvote-bot demand Steemits failure of making content discovery right. I mean you only get seen if you are in Hot or Trending and this depends on your pending payout not your quality. Also is tag browsing really bad in Steemit. Upvote-Bots gives you atleast a chance to be seen.
I think if they make content discovery better, the upvote bots will decline :)
Nevertheless is it quite interesting to develop bots (e.g upvote bots), because you get a basic understanding how the infrastructure of the steem blockchain works. And that's the only purpose of this project, giving people and easy start on understanding steem ;)