I agree with bots being used as a promotion mechanism for which authors had to pay.
However, the author also makes a revenue as a result of the upvote received from the bot, many times higher than the payout made to the bot, therefore generating a ROI for the author. This results into steem inflation for content which might be just garbage.
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This is not true in most cases anymore. The vote buying market is getting more and more efficient which is driving the direct returns down. Many bid windows are slightly on the negative ROI side which is about where I think they should be.
Indeed, ROI should be negative for the author when using bots. The other thing which drives ROI on the positive side is the market value of SBD, which is internally considered as $1 while on the free market it is much higher.