Im in the same boat as you. I had a series running where i promoted other authors and creators by using bots once i started earning some more serious Steem and getting recognized by the music community. Trying to use the bots in a positive manner and promote such use..
After some time i realized that anything you did with bots was counter productive. Bots, for all the uglyness in the word are truly a cancer for this platform
If you google "tumor" and compare the main characteristics and effects a tumor has on the body you can easily find the parallel with what bots are doing to this platform.
This is a very harsh comparisson and i apologise to anyone that might feel offended by this, but the parallel is more then vivid to me.
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Thank you for your response @chbartist. To make it clear i came here for the money and a part of me always stay here for the money. I'll try to stay always positive. My point is just how all these options on Steemit are used.. some in good some in bad manner and that is very subjective view too.
One of the most important points for me and also the most challenging i think is the valuation of that what we are doing here. Writing content, interacting with each other, curating, earning rewards, powering up/down.. using bots. Steemit has a answer for all of that. There are many moving parts come together to build this economy here. If i would color from green over gray to red the behaviour on Steemit i see a gradient with a big gray belt.
Something which is not abuse at the first glance but if you look deeper you see all the relations between the moving parts of Steemit and what implications that has long term for the platform or may have. That was the reason why i stopped bots completely and decreased my daily payouts because indirectly i supported the gray or in some cases unconsciously maybe the red area with bad actors.
The other thing is always wealth distribution on a bigger scale. We have this common reward pool and yes there is a social aspect to it. As i understand the mechanism for example if someone is paying a bot with high amounts of SBD to get an big upvote the payout comes from the common reward pool where all Steemians get their payouts from. The bot operator itself gets huge sums of cash from the author. The clear winner is the bot operator and second the author who payed and get this big upvote. I would be concerned if these practices would be a standard on Steemit.
Regards
Yes there is no free lunch.. if we always take excessively and don't analyze and be aware of what's really going on behind (if you pay a bot to get a booster who gets the money? not you, Where is money coming from? the Steemit reward pool, not from the bot) then we pull the roots out of the ground and not just the reward pool dries out.. the whole community suffers until it's gone.
Your metaphor puts it in a nutshell.. we should stop to find excuses why we must use this or that.. for visibility, to get back what we invested or whatever.. in the end it's always the same.. for ourselves.. but asking the question is this really in our favour long term or just selflish self-destruction?