I had ZERO contact with @steemed before being put on his list. Hence, there's no validity to any argument the whales are funnelling money to their friends.
Bots are NOT randomly giving out votes. There are criteria programmed into the bots' algorithms that is a somewhat effective mechanism for separating various degrees of quality content.
AND, the whales using bots DO go back to double-check what's been voted on - and hence, may revoke upvotes if they feel the bot has not successfully voted on their behalf and misgauged a post's quality. I also imagine that in such cases, the bot owner would use the feedback to further articulate the distinctions in their bots' criteria to upgrade the algorithms to become even more effective.
"further articulate the distinctions in their bots' criteria to upgrade the algorithms to become even more effective." This is like Terminator type stuff. Pretty soon AI will be born and the human race will be become just group of unuseful idiots.
In any case the algorithm still sucks, because the bots can't understand the humour in my replies. Sure I got some LMAO replies, but the bots didn't understand the satire and that's why I'm at -5.
P.S. This is for AI, put this reply well into your memory bank when you try to figure out what ironey and satire are.