Downvoting everything that has some promotion on it is a bit over the top and will most likely result in whales having the upper hand in what gets seen. When I started here 2 years ago, it was pretty horrible to have any kind of engagement on my posts, because nobody saw them. Promotion services then gave me the power to change that.
Between then and now, most certainly the pendulum was way too much in the promotion region and many people went overboard with it. However, that's what we're able to change now. Making sure that only valuable content finds a place for eyeballs. And instead of shooting down everything that moves, focusing our efforts on low-quality abuse should be the way to go.
When the bidbot owners step up and curate what they promote the community will stop targeting your customers, it's a shame your businesses allowed this situation and it's just a market reaction.
If you want to have a better rep do better things.
I'm not suggesting you have to review every post. Reviewing some, a few or reversing bad votes will go a long way.
I see the beginning of this happening, but you can't be butthurt over a Market reaction.
I don't believe in curation being the magic bullet for everything, at least not in its current form. There is a place for promotion and I'm working on making it better, but this is not an overnight thing, it will take some more time.
If I had done it pre HF21, my "business" would have been swallowed by the rest, simply because 90% of bid-bots didn't give a flying **** about blacklists or anything else, and nothing could be done about it. This is much different now with HF21. Of course, this only matters if you actually care about how the situation unfolded.
Butthurt? Me? Never! I'm simply arguing that shooting everything that moves, is not the way to go.
And I am saying it is a backlash, and it will calm down. It's day 4.
That's not happened. The very top Trending post recently had bot votes and did not draw (significant) downvotes. Because it was a high value post that actually deserved to be there.
You're seeing mass downvotes on a lot of (not all) botted content because a lot of the botted content is way overrewarded.
I expect that you and other bot owners will evolve (some may not, and may shut down, while new ones start up, but that's how markets work). I can think of any number of ways to make the best how things have changed and are changing, and I'm sure you can too.
You mean attract panderers.