In many cases it is the only indirect route to the owners. I'm not a fan of Blind downvote of promoted content.
However, haven't the bidbot owners gotten in the habit of blind upvoting content? And expecting the community to clean up behind them?
This is just a reaction, when they have a better business model and show more responsibility to the community the dislike of them will not be as strong.
We should target the users of the most offensive bots. Their customers (the good ones) Will use more responsible bots to support. Then we kill the worst and save those who hold value in the community.
In turn, the delegators will move their stake to the good bots that manage to find a way to do less damage.
I like to say, vote with your dollars, in this case... Vote with your vote. Do not support witnesses or bots that do not have a stated standard and a plan for removing bad votes.
The idea that because it is subjective it can't be done is lazy and bullshit.
The dislike the community has towards the bidbots is a direct response to the way they have conducted themselves.
They need to run some PR and clean up their act. Whining isn't going to help them
I can see this being the case at times, but I noticed the link on your post the other day the bot service had a post and comment in the last 7 days I threw my weak downvotes on. I figure if not for the greed of those running the service there would be very few posts to target. They get away unscathed and richer while the person using their service takes full brunt.
There is this going on with one of the vote services right now, with flexing going on. I used a downvote there as well for the bullying being used under a pretense of seeking dialogue with the writer of the post.
As you can see, the authors post has been greyed.
Will be interesting to see where all of this goes.
Fyrstikken spent 2 hours in my discord today talking to us about avoiding the war! He has created some standards.
Just read your post. Sorry no value to my vote anymore. Since the fork is went back to zero. Might as well vote at 1% on comments now. :)