I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of posting value amounts publicly. It creates the problem of comparison for new people who get on here, then get discouraged when they see how some are gaming the system. Then some just start to game it for profit anyway leading to more spam.
Even so, compared to Twitter, FB, etc, this site has less spam. If one is going to do comparisons, it should be to how one is doing today compared to yesterday and the day before.
I don't ever see upvote bots getting banned here on the Steem platform, but if enough whales can be convinced to stop accepting bids from accounts with reputation of 60+ then it would go towards creating a better distribution / decentralization of rewards.
The way it is right now, those bots act like a bait and switch. When the price of Steem is rising, one can make a small profit, and when it's falling you're likely to see a loss with the only advantage in the reputation score. Unfortunately it ruins the reliability of reputation scores and makes it less meaningful. It essentially amounts to buying reputation in hopes that new users not knowing what's going on will see that big rep number and think the post is important and maybe in the future you finally get the recognition.
I would have preferred that the reputation system be delinked from the profit motive in such a way that upvote bots deliver profit, but not reputation points. That way one can {maybe} get rewards if one wants to gamble in that way, but help keep the integrity of the system.