I am very concerned about this actually. I don't think boting is generally a bad thing. If you think there is a User who is always writing undervalued posts it is OK to push him with auto-votes.
However I also don't use @randomwhale and @booster , because I believe this is not how the Steemit upvotes should work. An upvote should always mean "I like that content".
What is your opinion on payed-for votes @krnel? Is there something I do not see that explains why so many use the service? Many among them that I hold dear and that I would not unfollow because of it, btw.
Indeed. Upvotes are supposed to be a refection of an evaluation of the content that someone gives someone else. Buying upvotes from people is not an evaluation of the content. It betrays the purpose of votes to evaluate media and give rise to popularity of content.
Here's a positive use case for buying votes from bots like @booster.
Once every two weeks I create a newspaper-like post in which I choose a few posts that I liked the most from the previous two weeks. I set the rewards payout for that post at 1% for me and 99% for the authors that I choose to feature in that post. In that way I try to 'artificially' extend the reward payout for those posts so that authors can earn a little bit more.
For the last two such posts I created, I bought a few upvotes from @booster, @discordia or @worldclassplayer in order to increase the author reward for those two posts so that the authors featured in those two posts will be awarded a little more beyond the upvotes that are naturally received from normal Steemians and beyond my upvote which is worth only 3 cents.
You can check the posts here and here.