Bid bots will always disappear and reappear, revamped, with new faces, and new narratives that make it seem like they are not bid bots. When they are.
The stronger the narrative, the larger the legion of fans will be when it comes to taking down the project, after all, who would be against an initiative that only wants to 'help the little ones against the evil whales'.
Some may even accuse me of being a 'captain of the woods' (for those who are not very familiar with the subject, it was the black man who had privileges and obeyed the white man to capture or deliver rebellious slaves). Which I would easily refute by showing the few rewards I have earned for years, even after almost 8 years at Hive.
However, this bid bot practice has always been contained, hunted down and eliminated. After all, it makes no sense for a content appreciation platform to have paid content to receive. Or does it?
Since we are in a decentralized community, at some point the bid bot could and I believe was 'allowed', not legally, but there was a blind eye to certain projects, until it was noticed that ANY content was being voted on.
If my memory serves me right, Helios and UpMe started by burning tokens from their communities in exchange for votes, but the vote was not guaranteed (which in part did not classify them as bid bots), but over time they voted on any content in exchange for the burning of tokens, keeping some users increasing their rewards and especially the project holders, who were the largest holders of the tokens that would be bought to be burned.
Projects that actually seek a token burn, or an accumulation of tokens, or anything like that, does not mean that they are bid bots, but conditioning these actions by an exchange of votes does make them bid bot projects.
I will give as an example the community in which I am one of the leaders, HiveBR. We curate content that has its text in Portuguese, after all, we want to expand our language within Hive.
Keeping the HBR token from our community defines a maximum that you can earn in terms of % of votes, but it does not mean that you will win the vote. You can be the largest holder of HBR in Hive, having 99% of the tokens. Even so, if your content is not of good quality, one of the curators can vote with 1% of your publication, if he or she decides that it is what your content deserves.
Another user who uses the tag, but does not create content in Portuguese, can receive an incentive vote, as I have done many times, seeing publications in which the content was entirely in English, using the hivebr tag, and I would give a 5% vote (symbolic) and leave a comment asking the person whenever they use the hivebr tag to also include the content in Portuguese, since it was a tag from the Brazilian community.
Anyway, bidbots are a topic that will always be on the table. It was already in 2017 when I arrived. So projects that had bad practices were eliminated and they were left without them for a while, until after a while they came back with a new narrative, but the same practices.
It is important to remain vigilant and avoid bad practices. Congratulations to everyone who is fighting this.