Interesting read mate!

Im doing an experiment with bots at the moment - just had a week using bots and now having a week bot free to compare:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@conradt/the-great-bid-bot-experiment-ready-to-cleanse-myself-of-bots

I think that if you want to get anywhere near trending then yes you need to use bots - its the sad truth. I am probably going to stop using bots after this I really dont think it was how Steemit was intended to be - it is meant to be manual curation!

I agree when I use the bots I only upvote the best content and not every single post - some Steemians really look down at people for doing this