I'm so glad I discovered bots within my first few days on here. By my third post I was using them, and I credit my getting off to a fast start to that.
Since I've not ever been here at a time before the bot dominance began, there has never seemed anything wrong with them to me. I just look at it as paying for advertising while I grow my follower base.
When I was on FB I saw how boosting posts changed performance of pages (like 3k followers with very little engagement after 2 years without boosting, or 3k highly engaged followers after 3 months with boosting!). So as soon as I found this "boosting" method on here I knew it was just a part of succeeding on the platform.
Yeap... works kind of like that!
Thanks for another great comment.
Cheers