Let me set something straight here. There are quite a few more bots than the two you have listed that use a blacklist, some of them are quite extensive. These bots have a myriad of different tools and options at their disposal to combat spam on the platform - for example:
- Regular and/or shared blacklists
- Donate bids from blacklisted users to an account like steemcleaners
- Block bids on posts that have been flagged by a number of anti-spam accounts
- Block posts using a specified tag
- Block posts created too recently which spammers usually do to avoid the curation rewards
- Limit the number of times a specific user can bid per round
Where do you think all of those tools and options came from? I have spent many, many hours of my scarce available time building all of these things and many more and they are all open source and freely available for anyone to use.
On top of that I have built many other features which reduce the profitability of the bots in return for a better user experience, all of which I implement first and foremost on my own bot.
I have blacklisted @movietrailers and will continue to blacklist any accounts that are obviously engaging in plagiarism. I happen to disagree with you and some other bot owners on this one point about whether or not to refund bids from blacklisted users. I disagree with it on principle, not because i feel it will reduce the earnings to my bot (which I honestly don't think it will really have much of an effect on anyway).
We are both going after the same goals here. I literally have a significant portion of my family's savings invested in Steem and very much would like for the platform to succeed and grow. We may disagree on how best to accomplish that, but that's ok - that's life.
I think you are a great writer and I enjoy the content you post, but I expected you to be more open minded to the fact that other people can have different opinions than you on some of these topics. I take offense to the fact that you are accusing me of promoting spam and plagiarism on the platform because I am only after profits when there is significant evidence to the contrary.
If you're interested in having a constructive and respectful conversation about the topics at hand I am always open to that, otherwise the conversation ends here.