Using the promote tool is nothing like using a bot... There are no official bots. These are accounts set up by users.
When you spend money to promote your post, it is destroyed, decreasing the supply of the currency, which is intended to increase value. The whitepaper laid all this out for everyone, but since it's not a "rule", no one cares about how this was all intended to operate. Steemit has become a game of "who can get the best ROI?"
It would be really hard for minnows to make it anywhere. 93% of steem is already owned by 1% of users. A junk article getting submitted to an upvote bot should be discouraged and naturally unprofitable. If a quality post gets submitted, then that will give it more visibility and ability to go viral. It is necessary and profitable for both the upvoter and upvoted if the content is quality. And users will be able to see the quality content easier. From my perspective, it is necessary.
Taking away the ability for different types of upvote bots would hurt the ecosystem overall.
I think my point is still being missed. So because Steemit is "hard" to get started, everyone should just disregard how it was all set up to work in the first place until they've started making money?
Every time I argue my point, it just seems like I'm being told left and right that I should be trying to profit off the system instead of using it the way it was intended.
And if that's the case, what's the point in even creating quality content? If you're not going to follow certain guidelines, why follow any of them? I could have written a bot months ago to rape the reward pool for everything I could get out of it, but I didn't, because I'm what you call scrupulous.