I am also using voting bots, but on a very limited amount. Still, I do not find it fair. Why? Because having a look on what others are doing, you see a lot of missuses of the voting bots and good content very often is not visible due to those paid votes. Steemit built the Promoted section, but I haven't seen it used very often. My opinion is that promoted content should go to the Promoted section.
Thank you for your comment.
I think good content is missed because the website has a structural problem and the new posts get a very low exposure time. If I check a section from Steemit, besides of the one I follow or follow me, than it is the New section. Now you have about 6 to 10 seconds to get seen.
Promoted does not make any sense now, as with it SBD is burned at the pegged value of 1. That does not make sense. A lot of users are selling their votes in private. This is the same as bot use would I say, with the advantage to bots that are transparent because the transaction remains on the blockchain and does not get deleted from discord as the private sales.