This post brought up a lot of interesting aspects of promotion/advertising in relation to the value of the Steem token that I hadn't thought of before. For that I thank you @yabapmatt. I, too, have been awaiting this post from you and the angle you took on it is informative and intriguing. I have used bots occasionally- dabbled with them early on, but didn't get a positive ROI or any noticeable benefits for my account on Steemit. This, coupled with the general "frowned upon nature" of using voting bots on the platform led me to try to grow my account organically. But I really appreciate where you're coming from here. I agree with you that most of the top witnesses do have a high degree of awareness on the platform and want it to succeed. Again, I hadn't thought of advertising services as boosting the token in quite that way. That's of course a huge boon to many of us powering up SP.

Of course, like so many, my main offense in the voting bot category is just the way it makes Steemit appear to an outside group of people due to the overall poor material on the trending page (so much better stuff out here making less than $2!). I understand it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to truly control the quality unless someone was fully dedicated to the task as a full-time job! I am glad to hear you say "do away with trending". Like many others I don't read it, but find/follow/peruse content "through the grapevine" so to say.

Personally, I've found it more sustainable/lucrative for my account to delegate SP to a private bot service that then gives me a daily upvote. It's nothing to get me anywhere close to "trending", but it provides me a steady positive ROI. As I said above, my experience was different than spiritualmax's in that I didn't find using the bots really helped my account grow. I'll be interested to see how SMTs, Oracles, Communities, etc all shift this current conversation significantly. It seems that with the SMTs and Oracles on top of the blockchain, Steemit.com and its issues will fade as the Communities come into focus. Again, thanks for writing this piece and sharing your thoughts as a witness, bot owner and all around person who cares about the future of Steem.