It's really great reading your contribution on this subject. Particularly, I appreciate the dynamic perspective you introduced into the discussion which is why bid bots don't vote themselves. It is, really, a tough question.
However, I don't think bid bots refuse to vote themselves because of rules against self voting. In fact, whales such as @adsactly and @sndbox self vote. The only reason why a bid bot would refuse to self vote is because it is less profitable than receiving bids from users. Don't forget that whatever they get from bids is 100% profit unlike pay outs which involves spliting pay outs into SBD and SP and paying at least 16% to curators.
It is a pleasure to have your contribution to this subject. Thanks and be great.
Thanks for your reply. Having been on Steemit I do see why bid bots can be profitable to the bots especially when many times the bids are worth more than the vote. But lets say a bid bot says I will only accept bids up to 50% of my vote value well then in this case the bot would "loose" money as it could have just voted for itself with full value. To me if a bid bot is really trying to help minnows or promote good content then it should not take profit and put such a limit to what bids it takes. But in this case people would just be at their computers trying to get in a bid as early as possible which is what i think is happening to MinnowBooster upvote service now.