I am always up in the air on the topic. I think the use of vote bots is good in that it evens the playing field. If the playing field was not so skewed (and I think that is the real problem here) the use of bots would not be required. When in Rome... When on steem... use bots.
If you don't, it is like choosing to cut off your leg and run a marathon.
I really value your posts about bots and the fact that you're sharing results of testing those bots. Great piece of work.
Each one of us is following loads of poeple but we can only upvote 10times a day. So we will select carefully our upvotes. And knowing that upvoting particular individual would bring some solid reward, most users will most likely choose to upvote his posts. That's just the way it is.
So I found it important to make sure that your posts bring some decent rewards. Otherwise I would risk losing some of my valuable curators.
There is very "real loyal followers". Im involved in social media marketing for over 2 years now and I've learned that most followers need to be rewarded for their time. One way or the other - authors need to find a way to reward their active followers. Otherwise they will lost most of them. That's the reality.
So right now we have 3 methods of benefiting your curators:
Creating quality content is an amazing idea. But ist not enough. Curators will almost always upvote those posts, that will bring them $$$.
end of story :)
I like ^^^
That is pretty good.