You are right - the bots themselves are not bad directly. But indirectly, as it sucks away curation money which is not available for content. You got to use them now to get views. But we would be better off without them I believe.
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Bots are here to stay, we should reward them when they upvote quality content and penalize when they upvote bad content. Quality content must be found by consensus and therefore upvotes should be secret for first 7 days to avoid sheep-voting.
If you would not see the votes for the first seven days than the argument for the bots that they are a promotional tool would be completely absurd. The only reason to use them would then be for sheer profit.
Good point: How do we construct trending page if votes are secret? I guess the solution could be voting in rounds - in 1 hour, 5 hours, 24... after each round we would show the votes. But it could cause other problems.