Well, I see steemit as a competitor to other social networks. It rewards authors (who are writing posts) and curators (those who upvote). Through their upvotes the post gets its value. There is a specific amount of steem held in the so called reward pool. The curators decide through their upvotes, how this pool is devided among all the authors and curators. There are some services that offer votes for money. So like this guy (@tcpolymath) you could- instead of posting high quality content - just post some whatever you like shit and buy a huge upvote. You can send lets say 100 SBD to @smartsteem and their curation trail will be upvoting your post. In fact they won't really ask about the quality, because they all earn curation rewards out of this. The abuse about it is, that this value in upvotes is not in the rewardspool any longer, so there is less steem available to be devided between honest authors that are putting up high quality posts and earning just a few bucks with it. The meaning of a vote is nothing when its bought whereas it originally is designed to reward quality content. The community will decide what content is worth beeing on top of the lists. Like here, out of the community this post would have reamined almost unseen and at least earned a few bucks, until this guy invested 100 SBD in buying upvotes. At least this is going to end up as a snowball ponzi and some day possibly new people who want to join steemit will look at the trending page and just walk away because it's full of scam that was bought in. It corrupts the whole idea of what a rewards based social blogging platform should be. Used like this, steem is a scam in the end. There is no real value in it if everyone behaves like those guys. Just a greater fool ponzi.
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Thank you for your response and but I am still not fully convinced with why using bots is bad. I understand that they can be used wrong and drain the reward pool but does it make bots bad? I can see that they can be used wrong but is the fault really in the steemit? I believe that the "GOOD PERSON TOKEN" could fix the spam/bot problem thought.
Here few posts that I found useful related to topic:
GOOD PERSON TOKEN: Something Big Is Coming From Steemit Inc!
Vlog 302: The value of STEEM on a blockchain full of SMT's. Many things will change.
A bot per se can not be bad or good or so, because he is just a program and we are not in any matrix (as far as I think;) you're right with that. But raping the reward pool with the help of such bot, even profiting out of that because often the upvote value is higher then the investment or selling votes and earning curation rewards for that, is bad in so far, that steem will go to zero substantially when behaviour like this spreads all over the place. Because that way, no real value is involved it is just crypto money sent around. It becomes a greater fool ponzi. You can count that! And with the post you are linking, that just proves that I am right, because they are already searching for an alternitive to implement where pay for vote is no longer possible the way it is at the moment. Bu this would be another token, I am really not convinced by that idea. New tokens and ICO's everywhere, everyone seeing this from an outside perspective would surely think this is a great big bubble which will pop very soon. The idea behind this steemit community must be a responsible rewarding system and this has to come from the joining people themselves, whether they are whales or minnows or whatever. In a decentralized system everyone is allowed to do whatever he or she wants. And so it can only work when peoble take responsibilities for their part of the game instead of just substantially draining it.