I use bots to help me optimise how I spend my time on steem for more human interaction.
I don't auto-upvote on my main account, nor am I too particular about vote timing/sizing to maximise curation rewards.
However, I do have an auto-voter running on an alt account that I have manually curated authors I would like to support long term. When that has spare VP then it throws votes about mostly randomly, but with some bias towards minnows. If we want steem to grow then we need minnows to grow into dolphins.