As far as throwing up their hands and saying "it's not like I knew what community standards are"... I call bullshit on that, I'm afraid. The community standards are the same as anywhere else on the net, only the stakes are higher. Spam for profit, gaming the system without regard for the community, and other bad behavior isn't acceptable anywhere on the net. Why would it be here?

That being said, there's definitely a large grey area here. And yeah, it's hard to navigate. Like you say, it's hard to put hours of work into a post, only to watch someone who wrote a paragraph boost themselves to trending with bots (although it doesn't feel much better when this happens with actual votes).

My experience has been that if you're getting under 50 sbd of voting power from the bots, using them actually hurts you. Like you say, it's not a great look in general. But after you get high enough up you get over a hump and hundreds or thousands of people will upvote you.

I mean, just look at this post by @jerrybanfield. The highest upvotes are from bots, and he's raking in the dough like there's no tomorrow. This is true for other posts on trending, too.

Doing things in this way feels a bit scammy, like gaming the system. I don't want to become dependent on bots. Then again, it is quite an opportunity. It's very much a dilemma.