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I totally understand and I have nothing against the users, I'm against the "system". But when you say making a lot of Steem organically, by using bid-bots you don't make any Steem, you spend some to gain some (and in fact you're losing money with the 25% curation rewards that are going to curators - the bid-bots). The only ones making Steem with these services are the owners themselves.

The problem is that the whole economic system resolves around them so everybody is just thinking : "I need to get some rewards, I'm gonna use some bid-bots", and in fact this is blocking all "normal" activity of people voting each other, interacting with eath other and so on... Everyone focuses on the rewards in $ under their posts (or next to depending on your front-end) instead of focusing on interaction. And the illusory trending page (which is only in fact a leaderboard of who gave the most money to the bid-bots owners) is encouraging that behavior.

The ones with the means to buy enough votes get on trending and get some attention, for all the others, using bid-bots doesn't bring anything organic, just the illusion of having rewards on your posts (hence upvotes by people who deemed your content worthy of getting their upvote).

At this stage, I just think the problem is the systematic use of these services, who are destroying all the Steem economic system, which is distributing rewards to content creators, depending on the upvotes received by the community.

Although my experience level is 50+ I'm slowly learning about Steem as i go. Yes, that 25% curation is unfair and now I just realised we profit little using those bid-bots.

It's also quite unfair when new users get to upvote with ≤0.001 and it means a post could have 100+ upvotes but barely any reward!

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The system is really complex, and even people that are here since the start still learn new things everyday. The curation is, for me, fair, as it rewards you for upvoting other people posts (hence reading, interacting, finding good content, etc.). In the case of the bid-bots it's different, as they profit from this curation system without bringing the "good things" (interactions, as they're are automated bot paid for voting) that are expected from this system.

And yes for the little upvotes, that's unfair as Steem is 100% based on stake (your Steem Power, hence your wealth) and they should be other criterias taken into account (interaction for example, engagement in the community, etc.).