That's absolutely true. I have used @smartsteem to promote this post and since its a bot it doesn't represent human curation.Agreed :)
Yeah, bid voting is a gamble with relatively less ROI for the amount you pay to promote, but the expectation and the idea behind using this is that your post will have a wider reach and if the content is good, you will gain more followers and gain real human votes and comments from other Steemians...
I would never have had these many comments and interaction here if i didnt use upvote bot service..Infact if not or the upvote service, you wouldn't have left a comment here let alone read my post or know who i'm...curious who's behind @honesteem...
Also I would appreciate it if @therealwolf would comment on this too with regard to the ROI part...Cant barely breakeven mate...Hope to hear from you soon...
That's the price of promotional service. In real life, you can't even expect partial refund, let alone ROI, when you pay an advertising firm. With falling Steem prices, it is even harder to expect a return.
To be frank, I think @honesteem's service is mostly useless because they cannot detect "paid advertisements" from off the chain, and I've been to enough Discord servers to know that they happen.
And the notion that human curation represents community appreciation is ludicrous. I guess they have never seen huge circlejerks before. But hey, that's none of my business.