Hello Paula!
First, I am happy to make an up-vote.
Secondly, I think that we are not taking the long view when we say that “the bots are okay; because, like human beings, some are good and some are bad".
Let’s stop and ask exactly what functions the bots are performing.
There are certain functions for which they provide excellent and cost-effective support to human effort, and we know those functions.
There is another function where we minnows need bot support to offset the ‘pro-whale skew’ in the powered-voting system. However, there remains the important issue of how much these bots should be allowed to drain away steam power from helpful human curators in the daily pay-out pool, especially on topics where bots are simply unable to judge quality.
There are other functions where the spread of bots into Steemit is very bad news for this service. Steemit will fail as a venue for ‘social chatter’ when people find they are consistently unable to distinguish whether they are responding to a human being or to a robot. That’s my ‘two cents’ anyway.
"Steemit will fail as a venue for ‘social chatter’ when people find they are consistently unable to distinguish whether they are responding to a human being or to a robot" I could not have put it better myself