Thank you so much for pulling out the bot votes. This is very interesting. I used bidbots to good result from mid December until about mid February. Then they died as a profitable endeavor and I am not going to lose money on them in the hope a whale sees me - or whatever people are going for.
I used them small, and strictly to get my posts over $10 payouts (for the no-follow), to reward my real voters better, and to make a profitable bid for myself. That all changed after the cat and bernie got involved. I'm all for reducing spam and garbage here, so I do not really disagree with their efforts. I just stopped in case one of those guys decided I would be a good person to downvote since I have no time or energy to follow their rage and avoid them.
But now all the bots on steembottracker are big and require very large bids. Whenever I check - they are all crashing hard. I do not have that type of money to waste. Ten cents I can do - $5? No. Most of the little ones are gone from the steembottracker anyway now and there is no way easy way to find out if you should bid or not.
Meanwhile - many people have delegated their sp to the bots and don't vote at all anymore. The bots are also sucking up the paid delegations, so the little guys are priced out there too.
Hopefully this monster will evolve in some better way to help the little guys. I'm not following the situation much now, but I still have hope. However, I checked a few friends who are still using bidbots and they are losing money big time - I would be sick to have such negative roi.
I really appreciate your reports and Steam Now. Thank you for all you do here.