hi @inquiringtimes. Thanks for opening this up.
I know I'm just a newbie and have so less rep yet. So this may not sound valuable to some. i just like to voice out what I observed. in fact, I'm learning little by little reading and exploring what do whales do.
The voting bots are hijacking the curation process, then again, they are democratizing in a sense. Because a lot of users get large autovotes on their content, regardless of the quality, so voting bots help to even the playing field in that sense. They can especially be helpful for new users, because people are more likely to look at a post if it has a $5 value than if it has a $0 value.
So true. I know I am not a good writer but I write to the best I can + the heart. It's just surprising to me too looking at those effortless posts which earned hundreds. What!? With that I'm learning to buy voting votes too recently. Of course, my writing doesn't change. I love and I care for steemit, and I don't have a plan to jeopardize the platform.