This is a matter of perspective.. and I actually give back way more than most steemians do with this business model (on top of all of my giveaways, free tutorials, videos ect).
Ok let me step back and try to see things from your perspective. In your mind, doing the giveaways, free tutorials, videos ect outweighs the overall harm caused by your selling votes? From your perspective, do you not believe the bots undermine curation, allow abuse accounts to proliferate mostly unchecked, and create a lot of strife and inequality on the platform? If everybody did what you did with your voting, how do you think that would turn out?
I wonder if I did an audit of your votes how many abuse posts I would find and I would like to know what exactly you are doing to mitigate the effects and ability of users to abuse your "services". I would trust that at a minimum, you have the BAW Blacklist API , right? It's certainly not an effective deterrent as users can easily switch accounts. It's something so would commend you for that as other bot owners are indiscriminate. (something should probably be done about that.)
If you really care about stopping the flood of abusers destroying the value of the token you hold, you could always hit 'em where it hurts. Right in their ROI! We've been able to flag and coordinate unvotes on abuse and have been successful in stopping it in some instances. If you were willing to coordinate, you would earn mad props from the abuse fighting community. I guarantee it.
It's Super Effective! I just modified this gif for you joe. Hope you got a kick out of it. Yes, I dad joke.
But the question is, are you the type of person to care about the broader implication about how you use your SP?
You may be busy but you could easily find a volunteer to help you use your VP to responsibly curate content that is conducive to real sustainable growth on the platform.
Or alternatively, you could maybe assist a project like @steemflagrewards to help take out the trash. Folks like us flag so you don't have to. Furthermore, we reward the activity of users finding abuse. (Check out last report. It's MOSTLY bid bot abuse which makes me sad.), we review their comments on the abuse, and have a bot that calculated ROI for the flag. That's what we are doing about the problem.
Anyways, maybe I'm wrong for being harsh with you but I grieved how working hard on this platform often is undermined by people selling votes to those that avoid hard work like a cat and water. We need to support builders if we really want to see Steem take off.
Every time, you sell your vote to an abuser, you are striving against that goal and all of us that care for a more equitable future. Hope it least part of that resonated with you. I can be a little mean at times and may not always express myself ideally but folks know where I am coming.
I understand your points above and I do agree that vote selling on the platform is probably not in the best interest of the community. That being said vote selling is allowed and I’m not the only one doing it. Also, bidbots have 10s of millions of Steem power powers up.. not selling.. keeping some Steem here and allowing people the choice to promote themselves. Why more people don’t use bidbots is honestly beyond me. From an investment in yourself they offer a unique opportunity, if used correctly. I sympathized with you on the abusers who are misusing the bid bot services. It’s my personal belief that Steemit inc should be in charge of dealing with this and cleaning up the trash / blacklisting users.