hey @zombee,
thanks for the feedback. I understand your concerns, but ..
Most people, don't have an account with over 500K SP that they can use, to promote their posts - like you. (Even if you believed that the cause would justify the action)
So they need an alternative. And while other services offer something similar, we are the first and most transparent which has a whitelist. (smartsteem.com/users/whitelist)
And this whitelist is the best way to prevent abuse from happening.
Will it remove abuse? No. Since we can only do so much and we can't look into what kind of future posts the user will create.
But we are actively blacklisting users who are producing SPAM-content.
Also - calling smartsteem.com simply a votingbot - is an understatement. We have @smartsteem, as bid-bot and @smartmarket which has over 2000 Vote-Sellers.
Anyways - I hope that you will see the value in it someday.