Good for you Anglo! For me it was a matter of deciding which advice to follow. One fellow who joined only 1 month before me and seemed to be making some headway (he's now at 59 reputation compared to my 43) told me how to use bots while my son who's been on here 2 months longer (with a rep of 53), and a few others, including a whale, said don't use them, they are a waste of time and money. I went with my son's advice, for one reason because I really didn't understand how they worked but mainly they just seemed to work against incentivizing quality. I'd see posts getting a bunch of upvotes, way more upvotes than actual views!!
I've been hit like that with a couple of my posts and figured, "Hell, what does this have to do with the quality of the content? They don't even read the post! It's all a matter of luck."
One thing that could be done is to remove the upvote button from the feed so people have to at least take the time to scroll to the bottom of a post to be able to upvote it. I suppose a bot can be designed to do that but I wouldn't be surprised if many curators just go in with their 100 upvotes per day and spend as little time as possible in curating which means all they do is read the feed and upvote from there.
But that's a minor issue compared to how much influence one can have by simply investing their thousands of dollars into steempower instead of just buying steem. I don't think a guy who invests $10,000 of his own money should have 10 times more influence than someone who invests $1000. He should get 2x, not 10x the influence, and the guy who invests $1000 should only get 2x the influence of someone with $100. Mitigating the influence of the whales will increase the relative reward that goes to good content. Only about 4% of the 30,000 active users have more than 5000 Steempower and I'd venture to guess most of them didn't get it with their quality content. Am I saying whales don't curate based on quality? I'm saying they can, but they don't have to, there's nothing preventing them from promoting crappy content or just ignoring, or not seeing, good content. There just aren't enough eyes with SP watching for it, and the bots are only exasperating the problem, near as I can tell. I'd sure like someone to explain to me, with math, not just opinions, why I'm wrong.
Thanks for your enlightening comment @kirbyhopper. I like your idea of issuing influence in a fairer and much more balanced way in order to level the playing field somewhat. The problem with that is there will always be those that say you need those bigger investors who were willing to dive in with hard cash when the platform was just starting out and so by investing and risking their money in the early days deserve more of a reward because they were responsible for stabilising Steemit from the start. It's a tough call but something needs changing, that's for sure.