What this means is that you either have to also start buying votes to compete with other users or you will be left with a smaller piece of the reward pool pie.
It seems to me that the only solution at this point is to encourage everyone to buy votes on their quality content and to eliminate the easy rewards just for running a bid bot.
This.
The Catch-22 situation of the so-called promotional element bot operators have tried to use as PR has been reached.
It's "Do or Die" mostly nowadays. Do throw your earned SBD away at somebody who just is slightly more connected and more apt at maintaining code.
If there were no bid bots grey operations would still happen but on a much lower scale and, finally, we could hope for investors with a mid- to long-term focus again, rather than the quick buck grab Wild Wild West this has become. But, obviously, that's logic the short term profit grabbers are not interested in.
Manual curators needed and a bot that will overpay to out support the maximisation bots. If a manual curator thinks it is worth more than the bid, bump it higher. Be picky and with enough SP, trending would have quality content providers that deserve the payouts, bidbot or not. Not that Trending matters anyway.
This is not going to go anywhere is it... wild wild west is the law of code.